Question

This should be simple but I guess I’m hitting a mental block- I have a mysql array containing a date and a name for each event. I want a header and a footer for each separate “day.” So it would look something like this:

New Day
     Event 1
     Event 2
End Day

New Day
     Event 3
     Event 4
End Day

My code so far looks like this, but I can only get the header to show up:

$day = null;
foreach($events as $event) {
    if ($day != date('d', strtotime($event->date))) {
        echo "New day:<br />";
    }
        echo $event->name;
        $day = date('d', strtotime($event->date));
}

So basically I loop through and compare “$day” to $event->day…This solves the header, but what should I do to get the footer to show up?

Answer 1

You can do the trick with just a couple of small additions:

foreach($events as $event) {
    if ($day != date('d', strtotime($event->date))) {
        if ($day !== null) { // ADDED THIS
            echo "End day<br />";
        }
        echo "New day:<br />";
    }

    echo $event->name;
    $day = date('d', strtotime($event->date));
}

if ($day !== null) { // ADDED THIS
    echo "End day<br />";
}

The idea here is that “end day” always precedes “new day”, with two exceptions:

• there is no “end day” before the first “new day”
• the last “end day” (if there are any) does not precede anything

The two conditions correspond directly to these two circumstances: if you have seen any “new day” outputs at all (can be checked very conveniently) then you want to precede “new day” with “end day” and also wrap up the output in the same manner.