Question

Why does the operator

$array['country'][] return what logically would be $array[]['country']?

What I am saying is this. If you want to extract from a MySQL array, the value of [‘country’] for every row, [1],[2]…[n], you have to use

$array['country'][]

despite fact that they are ordered as

$array['row#']['country']

Is this because PHP is reading something backwards, or because I am just lacking some fundamental array information?

FULL-ish code here

$result = array();
foreach($data as $value){

   $array['country'][] = $value['country'];
   $array['report'][] = $value['report'];
}
$data = $array;

Let me know if I am just dumb… I can’t really grasp why this is working this way.

Answer 1

Why does the operator

$array[‘country’][]

return what
logically would be
$array[][‘country’]?

It is because you are constructing the array in that way:

If you use $array['country'][] = $value['country'];, you are adding a new value to the sub-array which is part of the containing array under the country key. So it will be mapped to $array['country'][], you cannot expect otherwise.

If you want it to map to array[]['country'], then (using part of code from
@Lawrence’s answer), you’d have to add the new values using explicit numerical indexes as the key:

SELECT country,report from yourdb
$i=0;
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
  $array[$i]['country'][] = $row['country'];
  $array[$i]['report'][] = $row['report'];
  $i++;
}