Modifying array keys

[SJH]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to loop through an array and modify the array keys:

foreach($dates as &$key => $value) {

    if($key == $today) {
        $key = 'Today';
    } elseif($key == $yesterday) {
        $key = 'Yesterday';
    } elseif(date('W', strtotime($key)) == $thisweek) {
        $key = date('l', strtotime($key));
    } else {
        $key = date('l jS F');
    }

} 

When I run this code I get a blank page (despite error_reporting being set to E_ALL at the top - how helpful).

When I remove the & from in front of $key it runs, but obviously doesn't modify the key of the $dates array. It would seem that PHP doesn't allow you to pass the keys by reference, but I can't believe that this is the problem.

Anyone know what's up here?

Thanks

[lphy]

You cannot do like that. $key and $value are temporary variables generated in the loop, they do not point back to original array

Try something like this

foreach($dates as &$key => $value) {
    if($key == $today) {
        unset($dates[$today]);
        $dates['Today'] = $value;
    }
.........
.........
}

I am not sure why you doing something like this

[Salathe]

You cannot make a key a reference like that, resulting in a "Fatal error: Key element cannot be a reference" message (if errors are being displayed).

Can you paste more of the code to give us an idea of what you've got and what you're trying to achieve?

[SJH]

Thanks for the clarification - I thought it was unlikely that $value could be passed by reference but not $key, but I was wrong

I know of another way (albeit more long-winded) that I can go about doing this, so I'll go down that route instead.

[crmalibu]

As for why you didn't get an error message, keep in mind php first parses and compiles your script before executing it, one file at a time. If you have a serious error, then php never makes it past the parsing/compiling stage, which means nothing gets executed.

When you try to set configuration options in the script, such as the error_reporting level, or ini options, those are interpreted at runtime. Which means php needs to actually make it to the execution phase for that file

If you can't change the config on the php.ini or webserver level, you can do a trick. Make a new simple script which wraps the problematic script, changing the config before including the other script. includes are parsed at runtime, so it works

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 1);

include 'problemscript.php';