Loops still throw me for a loop

viveleroi0

I have three form fields in a form that have values like the following:

$field1="Glass";
$field2="Plastic";
$field3="Metal";

There would be many more values that could be entered. But, what I want to do is once the form is submitted, convert the field value into a preset two-letter combo.

Like:
Glass change to "GL"
Plastic change to "PL"

etc. Then put the results back into variables.

NewField="GL";
NewField2="PL";

type deal.

I hope that makes sense. Anyone know how I can do that, without doing an

if($field1=="Glass"){$NewField="GL";}

for every single combination, for each of three fields?

stolzyboy

this will take your $var and chop everything off after 2 characters, then change them to upper case

<?
$var = "glass";
echo strtoupper(substr_replace($var, '', 2));
?>

kevinsequeira

use arrays

$field_value = array("Glass"=>"GL","Plastic"=>"PL");

then do a foreach for the arrray

foreach($field_value as $key=>$value){
if($field1 == $key)
$newfield1 = $value;
}

if the field name are always field1, field2, field3 ie 'field' followed by a number, then you can use variable varaiblenames outside the foreach loop to have a compact search and replace
for($x=1;$x<$total;$x++){
$temp_field = "field".$x;
$new_field = "newfield".$x;
foreach($field_value as $key=>$value){
if($$temp_field == $key)
$$new_field = $value;
}
}
reg
kevin

ahundiak

Just a minor modification to kevinsequeira suggestion:

$field_value = array("Glass"=>"GL","Plastic"=>"PL");

$newfield1 = $field_value[$field1];