Help with loops and arrays.

[Inkybro]

Hello everyone,

I'm writing a simple poll system and wanted a dynamic way to handle virtually unlimited answers to a quuestion. The way I achieved this was by using a text field in MySQL and using delimeters to seperate the data. It looks like this:

Answer 12~Answer 24~Answer 3`8

I wrote functions to handle this data and they all do great, putting the data into a multidimensional array ($array[0][1] would give "2"). Now I needed a way to write a new string for the database and so I constructed a function to do it, but the problem is since ~ is a delimeter, it adds an extra one to the end every time someone votes. Here is my complete script:

<?php
  //Connect to MySQL
  mysql_connect("","","");
  mysql_select_db("");

  function parse_answers($answers,$s1,$s2)
  {
    $answers_ex = explode($s1,$answers);
    for($i = 0; $i < count($answers_ex); $i++){
      $answers_exa[$i] = explode($s2,$answers_ex[$i]);
    }
    return $answers_exa;
  }

  function display_answers($answers,$pollid)
  {
    for($y = 0; $y < count($answers); $y++){
      for($z = 0; $z < count($answers[$y]); $z++){
        if($z != 0){
          echo " -- ";
        }
        echo $answers[$y][$z];
      }
      echo " <a href=\"polls.php?a=2&id=".$pollid."&an=".$y."\">Vote</a><br>";
    }
  }

  function build_answer_str($answers)
  {
    for($y = 0; $y < count($answers); $y++){
      if($y != 0){
        $newstr .= "~";
      }
      for($z = 0; $z < count($answers[$y]); $z++){
        if($z != 0){
          $newstr .= "`";
        }
        $newstr .= $answers[$y][$z];
      }
    }
    return $newstr;
  }

  if(isset($_GET['a'])){ $a = $_GET['a']; } else { $a = 1; }

  if($a == 1){
    $p = 1;
    if(isset($p)){
      $chk_poll = mysql_num_rows(mysql_query("select * from polls where id='".$p."'"));
      if($chk_poll > 0){
        $poll_info = mysql_fetch_assoc(mysql_query("select * from polls where id='".$p."'"));
        echo "<b>" . $poll_info['question'] . "</b><br>";
        $answers = parse_answers($poll_info['answers'],"~","`");
        print_r($answers);
        display_answers($answers,$poll_info['id']);
      } else {
        echo "<center><b>The poll ID specified does not exist.</b></center>";
      }
    } else {
      echo "<center><b>No poll ID is set.</b></center>";
    }
  } elseif($a == 2){
    if(isset($_GET['id']) && isset($_GET['an'])){
      $id = stripslashes(strip_tags($_GET['id']));
      $an = stripslashes(strip_tags($_GET['an']));

  $poll_info = mysql_fetch_assoc(mysql_query("select * from polls where id='".$id."'"));
  $answers = parse_answers($poll_info['answers'],"~","`");
  $answers[$an][1]++;
  $update = build_answer_str($answers);
  echo $update;
  mysql_query("update polls set answers='".$update."' where id='".$id."'");
  echo "<center><b>Vote added. Thanks!</b></center>";
} else {
  echo "<center><b>Needed variables are not set.</b></center>";
}
  }
?>

[Installer]

$newstr = rtrim($newstr, '~');
return $newstr;

[Inkybro]

Thanks so much.