Question

It’s been awhile since I did any PHP programming so I’m trying to kick off the rust.

I’m trying to create an associative array structure as this.

[results]
     [total]
     [people]
         [name]
         [street]
         [city]
         [state]
         [zip]

Currently, I have this.

$people = array( 'name' => '',
                 'street' => '',
                 'city' => '',
                 'state' => '',
                 'zip' => );

$results = array('total' => 10, --set dynamically
                 'people' => $people );

So in my head I hope a making an empty multidimensional array that I will be able to populate in a while loop.

First, question is this the proper form? I feel like I’m close but not right. It might be helpful to understand what I’m doing (shown below).

So I as a said I want to fill this in a while loop and this is basically what I have so far. And by so far, I’ve been unable to get to work.

$i = 0;
while loop
{
   $results['people'][i][name] = 'XxXxX'
   $results['people'][i][street] = 'XxXxX'
   $results['people'][i][city] = 'XxXxX'
   $results['people'][i][state] = 'XxXxX'
   $results['people'][i][zip] = 'XxXxX'


 %i++;
}

I’ve tried many different combinations of this and have still been unable to get it right. If it matters, I want to take this array and send it back to the browser as a JSON object.

I’m not sure if my initialization is wrong, setting the array in the loop is wrong, or both.

Answer 1

PHP arrays need to be instantiated separately, and in-place. I don’t know how to describe it properly, but your code should look something like:

$results = array();
$results['total'] = $somevalue;
$results['people'] = array();

/*or:
$results = array(
  'total' => $somevalue,
  'people' => array()
);*/

$i = 0;
while($some_condition) {   //or: for( $i=0; $i<$something; $i++ ) {
   $results['people'][$i] = array();
   $results['people'][$i]['name']   = 'XxXxX';
   $results['people'][$i]['street'] = 'XxXxX';
   $results['people'][$i]['city']   = 'XxXxX';
   $results['people'][$i]['state']  = 'XxXxX';
   $results['people'][$i]['zip']    = 'XxXxX';

   /*or:
   $results['people'][$i] = array(
       'name'   => 'XxXxX',
       'street' => 'XxXxX',
       'city'   => 'XxXxX',
       'state'  => 'XxXxX',
       'zip'    => 'XxXxX',
   );*/

   $i++;
}

Bear in mind that if you’re using associative arrays you need to wrap the key string in quotes. Also, you can still access associative arrays using integer indexes the you should feel so inclined.