Set an interal array pointer

[Roman_Totale]

Is there a way to set the internal pointer of an array to an arbitrary point such that current() would return that item, next() would return the next item and prev() would return the previous item?

[thessoro]

if you only need one random current element, then the prev and the next... you could generate a random number from 0 to sizeof($array)-1
$current=$array[$number], $prev=$array[$number-1] and $next=$array[$number+1]
(taking care ($number-1)>=0 and ($number+1)<sizeof($array) )

[Roman_Totale]

I want to use an associative array to hold navigation elements.

From the querystring, I will grab an associative key which could fall anywhere within this (session) array. I want to use next and prev relative to this (current) array pointer--but I don't know how to set the pointer to an arbitrary array element. Can this be done?

[Weedpacket]

This came up a few days ago.

[Roman_Totale]

I didn't find that thread in my initial search.
This function does what I needed (loop through an array which was stored as a session variable from a database query), however, if the order of an associative array can change, this probably will not help the cause.

This function worked fine for my initial test, but I'll probably try to restructure all the arrays as multidimensional arrays with a numeric key, which seems like a more efficient way to go.

For the curious:

function nav_array($array,$current_item){
  $hold_values=array_values($array);
  $hold_keys=array_keys($array);

  $active_key=array_search($current_item,$hold_values);

  $max_key=count($array);

 if($active_key>0){
 $nav['last']=$hold_keys[($active_key-1)];
 }else{
 $nav['last']=$hold_keys[($max_key-1)];
 }

 if($active_key<($max_key-1)){
 $nav['next']=$hold_keys[($active_key+1)];
 }else{
 $nav['next']=$hold_keys[0];
 }

  return $nav;
}