Array Help

wonderbread

Hello everyone,

Long time lurker...first time poster. Anyways, I'm pretty new to php and some of my skills aren't exactly super advanced. I've been beating my head against my monitor for a couple of hours, searching the web, forums, etc. and have yet to find an answer. Hopefully it hasn't been covered here so I won't look like an idiot.

Anyways...

I have two variables already defined.

$question = "this is question four,this is question five,this is question three,this is question one, this is question two";

$questionorder = "4,5,3,1,2";

I'm exploding $question and $questionorder into arrays and then trying to create a new variable that is an updated list of the questions in the order that are meant to be displayed.

I've been looking into using associative arrays for this but am completly lost.

Any advice any one here could offer would be greatly appreciated.🙂

Thanks a ton!

LordShryku

Something like this should work. Set's the order as the key

// explode to arrays
$order = explode($questionorder);
$quest = explode($question);
// create blank array
$new   = array();

//insert values into new, associative blank array
for($i=0;$i<count($order);$i++) {
   $new[$order[$i]] = $quest[$i];
}

// sort array
sort($new);

pyro

Try something like this:

<?PHP
$question = "this is question four,this is question five,this is question three,this is question one, this is question two";
$questionorder = "4,5,3,1,2"; 

$questions = explode(",", $question);
$questions_order = explode(",", $questionorder);

foreach ($questions_order as $order) {
	echo $questions[$order-1]."<br />";
}

?>

Edit - Ah, LordShryku beat me... At least mine works... :p

wonderbread

Hi guys thanks for the great quick help. One other quick question.

Instead of simply echoing the value I need to create a new variable where the values are comma seperated.

I tried:

foreach ($questions_order as $order) {
$newvariable .= "$questions[$order-1],";
}

It didn't seem to work...(I didn't think it would)...do you have any suggestsions on how to do this?

Thanks a million!

pyro

Try this, then:

<?PHP
$question = "this is question four,this is question five,this is question three,this is question one, this is question two";
$questionorder = "4,5,3,1,2"; 

$questions = explode(",", $question);
$questions_order = explode(",", $questionorder);

$new_question = "";

foreach ($questions_order as $order) {
    $new_question .= $questions[$order-1].", ";
}

$new_question = substr($new_question, 0, strlen($new_question)-2);
echo $new_question;
?>

LordShryku

Originally posted by pyro
Edit - Ah, LordShryku beat me... At least mine works... :p

Didn't realize there was a critic in the house tonight. Here, this works :p

<?php
$question = "this is question four,this is question five,this is question three,this is question one,this is question two";
$questionorder = "4,5,3,1,2";
$order = explode(",",$questionorder);
$quest = explode(",",$question);
$new   = array();
for($i=0;$i<count($order);$i++) {
   $new[$order[$i]] = trim($quest[$i]);
}
ksort($new);
reset($new);
$string = implode(", ",$new);
echo $string;
?>

wonderbread

Thanks to both of you....really helped me out.

Cheers!

swr

Originally posted by wonderbread

Instead of simply echoing the value I need to create a new variable where the values are comma seperated.

The implode function does the opposite of explode.

Are you sure you can't just start off with an array and leave it as such? I often cringe when I see code that splits/joins on commas, because it usually means the person who wrote the code just didn't know how to use the proper data structures (arrays in PHP/javascript, foreign keys in SQL).