Question

This is a working example code from php doc for using list() with each()

<?php

$fruit = array('a' => 'apple', 'b' => 'banana', 'c' => 'cranberry');

reset($fruit);
while (list($key, $val) = each($fruit)) {
    echo "$key => $val\n";
}
?>

The output is

a => apple
b => banana
c => cranberry

I don’t understand why it works and output that way. Because,

from the API of each(), it says each() return an array with 4 key/value pair.
So each($fruit) should be like this:

Array
(
    [1] => yy
    [value] => yy
    [0] => xx
    [key] => xx
)

for the code:

while (list($key, $val) = each($fruit)) {
        echo "$key => $val\n";
    }

shouldn’t $key equal to each($fruit)[1], and $val equal to each($fruit)[value]?

Answer 1

Note:

list() only works on numerical arrays and assumes the numerical indices start at 0.

http://php.net/list

In other words, list actively looks for numerical keys in order. list($foo, $bar) requires that the assigned array has the keys 0 and 1 and will assign those to $foo and $bar respectively. It doesn’t matter which order these keys are in in the array itself.