I did notice that in the “Accessing Indexed Array Values” section you say that “value-2″ corresponds to index key 3 when it should say it corresponds to index key 1.

You might want to fix that, zero indexing trips people up enough when they’re getting started.

For those of us who will never be as smart as a “fredrik,” tutorials and explanations like this are very helpful and appreciated.

2 things first

1) Your bloging software looks hungry – you’ve got some $ missing in:

foreach (array as $value) (…)

2) While it’s true that you can declare arrays by simply calling $newArray[] = ‘some value’; witch will give you a nice 1 element array, it’s syntax-wise correct to declare the variable as array by doing:

$newArray = array();
$newArray[] = ‘some value’;

Else you’ll get an error at E_ALL error reporting level.

Aside from those two things – great explanation for the beginners among us

“An array is not an easy concept to grasp at first since an array has many values, or elements, and can be used in so many ways.”

aka. arrays are HARD, you should not freakin be in software development – if it doesnt come naturally you will always suck compared to those that it does for.

I did want to point out, however, that there’s a mistake in the nested foreach loops. The following:

foreach($myMenu as $key => $val){
foreach($val as $k => $v){
$url = $k;
$link = $v;
}
$output .= “<a href=\”$url\” title=\”$key\” id=\”$key\”>$link</a><br />\n”;
}

echo $output;

The above doesn’t generate the actual URL in the href attribute (which is wrong in your output example as well). Instead, it inserts the second array key:

<a href=”text” title=”home” id=”home”>Home Page</a><br />

This is because the second foreach loop is overwriting variables, first storing $url=”url” and $link=”home.html”, then storing $url=”text” and $link=”Home Page”.

This can be corrected by using the key to create variable variables that contain the value from the array.

The nested loops below will generate the desired output.

foreach($myMenu as $key => $val){
foreach($val as $k => $v){
$$k = $v;
}
$output .= “<a href=\”$url\” title=\”$key\” id=\”$key\”>$text</a><br />\n”;
}

echo $output;

Everything else looks solid. Great read!

(NOTE: I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that HTML tags work in comments, because I used a bunch of them. My apologies if this comment comes out all jacked up.)

I think it really takes a while using php until you realize how powerful and useful they are, from error reporting/displaying, to handling xml feeds, and results from MySQL.

Also, I really laughed when Mary said ‘they always throw her for a loop’, so many programming puns could be made, I just don’t know where to start. You know I love you Mary!

Great article Shane

thanks much Shane!

mary