Question

Why this does not work?

  $stringhaha ="     1 => General,
      2 => Business,
      3 => Entertainment,
      4 => Health,
      5 => Politics,
      6 => Sci/Tech,
      7 => Sports,
      8 => News";

$all_categories = array($stringhaha);

print_r($all_categories);

(will give an array with 1 item.)

While this works:
If I include the variable content like this it will create properly an array with 8 items:

$all_categories = array(1 => General,
      2 => Business,
      3 => Entertainment,
      4 => Health,
      5 => Politics,
      6 => Sci/Tech,
      7 => Sports,
      8 => News);

print_r($all_categories);

Answer 1

What is happening is exactly what you should expect: you’ve declared an array that contains one string.

It doesn’t matter that your string looks like an array to us humans, PHP is merely PHP, and can’t magically detect that you want it to parse an array from a string.

giorgio79, meet PHP Docs, your new best friend.