Array questions

SpeedStick

I just have a few questions regarding PHP arrays. First of all, is it possible to have the value inside the square brackets include non-numeric characters? For example, something like delete[A25]. If so, can I then include a variable inside the square brackets, such as delete[$id]?

Finally, is it possible to pull the value from the square brackets once the form is submitted? Therefore get both the value of the whole variable itself, and the variable inside the brackets [$id]?

Thanks in advance for any answers....

Installer

Yes, you can use non-numeric indexes: $delete['A25'] (use quotes).
Yes, you can use a variable as an index: $delete[$id].
Yes, you can get the value of the index variable: echo $id;.

You can learn more, more quickly, using the manual.

rnickel

if using $delete['A25'], make sure that the A25 is the key referencing the value....

i.e.

$array['A25'] = "TESTING";

echo $array['A25']; //will print out TESTING, NOT A25

SpeedStick

Thanks Installer and rnickel. As a follow-up to this, what if the key was not pre-defined as a value? That is, instead of delete[$id] it was delete['A25']. Would there be any way to uncover that A25 value using an array function?

Weedpacket

Read the manual to see what it says about some of the [man]array[/man] functions (yes, another link to the manual. The manual exists for a reason); there is a function there to retrieve from an array a list (actually, another array) containing all of its keys (optionally, those keys that correspond to a particular value). Shouldn't be too hard to figure out which (the name is pretty obvious).

rnickel

what is it exactly that you're trying to do?

SpeedStick

Thanks for the replies everyone. Sorry, I took a (brief) look through the manual before posting, but obviously not as much as I should have. I'm still not sure about retrieving the key from the array as there seem to be a couple of different functions related to this.

rnickel, there are a couple of things I'd like to do with this. First of all I'm putting together a rather simple record management program using mysql and would like to use arrays for the delete checkboxes next to each record, which unfortunately have mixed IDs such as A25 or even longer words. I thought it would be good to use arrays to see which records are being deleted. However, it's more important to me to retrieve the key of the array than the value itself, which would just be true or false with teh checkboxes. So with delete['twr'] set I know twr should be deleted. And then do a foreach() to delete each one.

My other use is somewhat similar to this one so I won't go through it here. If you know a better way of doing this please let me know - I'm used to just using delete links on these sorts of projects but in this case the checkboxes are necessary which has caused me a bit of trouble...

Weedpacket

[man]array_keys[/man]
Exactly what it says on the tin.

Or if you have a certain value and you want to delete all occurrences of that value in the array, ponder this bit of code[php[<?php

$array1 = array('this','that','that','this','foo');

$search = array('that');

$diff = array_diff($array1, $search);

print_r($diff);

?>[/code]