[Resolved] Find top few elements in an array

[pedalcars]

Am I missing an obvious function here?*

(*Probably, being a newbie)

I want to take the first few (three or four, probably) elements from an associative array and construct an HTML list from them.

"foreach" would be the answer if I wanted every element, but I don't.

The array itself will have new elements added to it periodically, so should be processed in the order it's written in the code (not sorted in any other way first). From a database table it would be easy, but we're not allowed databases on our web server (for fear of errant people writing unsecure database-driven sites, I think).

[laserlight]

A simple method would involve using [man]array_slice/man:

$temp_array = array_slice($array, 0, 4);
echo "<ul>\n";
foreach ($temp_array as $temp) {
	echo "<li>" . $temp . "</li>\n"
}
echo "</ul>";

You could duplicate the functionality with an in-place method:

$num = 4; //maximum number of array elements to use
$size = count($array); //total number of array elements
//set max to the smaller of $num and $size
$max = ($size > $num) ? $num : $size;
echo "<ul>\n";
for ($i = 0; $i < $max; $i++) {
		echo "<li>" . $array[$i] . "</li>\n"
}
echo "</ul>";

[pedalcars]

Excellent, thanks - I've used the first method, it's working fine.

🙂