Is this a good way?

[ph8edsicness]

I'm getting ready to set up a page that stores and displays movie times for a local discount theater. I plan to store the times in arrays and echo them into a TABLE for a nice presentation. My question is: Is this a good way to go about it? They have 7 different movies a week with roughly 7 showings of each per day.

// First Movie Array

$movie1 = "Just Married"

$showtimes1[] = "11:05am";
$showtimes1[] = "1:05pm";
$showtimes1[] = "3:05pm";
$showtimes1[] = "5:05pm";
$showtimes1[] = "7:05pm";
$showtimes1[] = "9:05pm";
$showtimes1[] = "11:05pm";

// Second Movie Array

Etcetera and so-forth.

[keith73]

Are you hard coding all of the data?

That's not a good or bad way, but it seems tedious.

my suggestion is to not hard code the data, but store it in files or a database and create an interface where it can be updated easily. But that's just how I would do it.

• keith

[BuzzLY]

I concur with the hard coding -- not a good idea. If you are opposed to creating a file or database containing the data, at the very least create an include file that just contains the movie time arrays, and include them into your PHP page where appropriate.

Also, include the name of the movie as part of your array:

$movie_a = array("Just Married", "11:05am", "1:05pm", "3:05pm", "5:05pm", "7:05pm", "9:05pm", "11:05pm");
$movie_b = array("Spider-man", "12:05am", "2:05pm", "4:05pm", "6:05pm", "8:05pm", "10:05pm", "12:05pm");
// etc...

$movies = array($movie_a, $movie_b, $movie_c, $movie_d)

//To extract a value:

$chosen_movie = $movies[0][0]; // Just Married
$chosen_time = $movies[0][3]; // 3:05pm

The good thing about doing it this way is that if you decide to use a database or file, the data will easily be read in to your variables.

[ph8edsicness]

I planned on putting the arrays into an include file. I just haven't gotten around to databases yet. If someone would want to give me a brief example of how to create a database it'd be much appreciated

[abnfire]

i recommand to learn full SQL for databases, because creating a table is easy but also you should know how to update, delete, select from the database. SQL is used in every databases.