arrays .. blah

Anon

I'm trying to do a simple text<->array set of functions
something like:

array_to_text($array){}
text_to_array($text){}

what happens...

I've got a string
$string="one,two,three"
I convert that to an array
$array("one","two","three")
I decide to delete "two" so I do unset $array[1]
now instead of:
$array("one","three")
which I assume I should have, I have:
$array("one", NULL, "three")

Is there another way to delete an entry?

Why isn't there just an array_delete/remove function? This has really been a frustrating problem.

I don't want to use serialize because I am trying to output something that is more user-friendly and doesn't add 8 or so characters per entry.

Also, the example listed below (that I copied from the manual) returned nothing when I tried it. So I presume there is an error.

Array Functions
Sort

1
2 $fruits = array ("lemon", "orange", "banana", "apple");
3 sort ($fruits);
4 for (reset ($fruits); $key = key ($fruits); next ($fruits)) {
5 echo "fruits[$key] = ".$fruits[$key]."\n";
6 }
7

frymaster

what you want is a vector class a la java (hey, that rhymes...) but there isn't one in php to my knowledge (maybe a new project there.... hm.)

try this
for($i=0;$i<count($first_array);$i++)
........if($first_array[$i] != NULL)
................ $second_array[] = $first_array[$i];

that should work, though i haven't tested it.

also, you should use explode() for making your array. it's handy, convenient and tastes great!

frymaster

wait! do i need braces on that code? or have i committed a java-ism?

Anon

Thanks, I did get it working.
One problem was that sizeof/count doesn't count the NULL (unset) entries in the array. So a for() would fail because it wouldn't process the entire array.

Fortunately, I can just use sort().
It's best to just use foreach() instead of a for(), anyway (which is what I do now).

I don't see much use for the current/previous/next (internal pointer) though. The manual example for sort() uses them, and it doesn't work (it doesn't display any output). :p