Only one item showing outside of foreach loop

[computerbarry]

Hi all

I’m running a foreach inside another foreach so I can display categories associated with each venue.

Once I place the $comboClass outside of the foreach loop - I only get the last category from the variable. But if I leave it within, I see all the categories - shown below the result.

The code

echo '<ul>';
          foreach($categoryArray as $venue => $items) {
            $venue = ucwords($venue);

            echo '<li>' . $venue . ' ';
            
            foreach($items as $item)
            {
              $cat = str_replace(" ", "-", (strtolower($item->category)));
              $comboClass = $cat . " ";
              echo $comboClass;
            }
            echo '<br><span>' . $comboClass . '</span></li>';
          }
          echo '</ul>';

The result:

Venue1 cat1 cat2 cat3
cat3

Venue2 cat1 cat3
cat3

Venue3 cat1 cat2
cat2
...

How do I print all the categories $comboClass within the span?
Why is it only printed the last category?

Please note:
The code above is just at testing stage right now. Once I understand the problem, I will be adding the $comboClass inside the <li class="' .$comboClass . '">

Thanks, Barry

[fretburner]

Hey Barry,

How are you doing?

If you look at this line: $comboClass = $cat . " "; you’re actually reassigning the value of $comboClass for every iteration of the loop. What you want to be doing is concatenating the values, like this: $comboClass .= $cat . " "; (notice the concatenation operator immediately before the equals symbol).

This will generate a PHP notice though, as $comboClass doesn’t exist on the first iteration of the loop. To solve this, you can declare it before the foreach loop and assign it an empty string.

Personally, though, I’d do this with an array rather than string concatenation:

$comboClass = array();

foreach($items as $item) {
  $cat = str_replace(" ", "-", (strtolower($item->category)));
  $comboClass[] = $cat;
}

echo '<br><span>' . implode(' ', $comboClass) . '</span></li>';

The benefit of this method is that it’s an easy way to ensure you only get separator characters between each item. It also makes it easy to process the array before outputting the final string, e.g. to sort or remove duplicates etc.

[computerbarry]

@fretburner

notice the concatenation operator immediately before the equals symbol

Arrrh! Yes - I recall seeing this and thought nothing of it.
Good catch

This is working great @fretburner thanks for the examples - I’ve managed to get things working how I need it (shown below).

@fretburner

easy way to ensure you only get separator characters between each item.

I realised this as the final category had a trailing space. This has tidied things up. I had both ways setup, though as you say better with the array() which I finally used.

<?php
foreach($categoryArray as $venue => $items) {
  $venue = ucwords($venue);
  $comboClass = array();

  foreach($items as $item)
  {
    $cat = str_replace(" ", "-", (strtolower($item->category)));
    $comboClass[] = $cat;
  }

  print "<li class='" . implode(' ', $comboClass) . "'>";
  ...
  print "</li>";
}
?>

And yes everything good, thanks for asking - Much better now I have this working
Been working on this past few nights

Good exercise!

Cheers, Barry