PHP For Each Loop
Imagine that you have an associative array that
you want to iterate through. PHP provides an easy way to use every element of an array
with the Foreach statement.
In plain english this statement will do the following:
- For each item in the specified array execute this code.
While a For Loop and
While Loop will continue
until some condition fails, the For Each loop will continue until
it has gone through every item in the array.
PHP For Each: Example
We have an associative array that stores the names of people in our
company as the keys with the values being their age. We want
to know how old everyone is at work so we use a Foreach loop to print
out everyone's name and age.
PHP Code:
$employeeAges;
$employeeAges["Lisa"] = "28";
$employeeAges["Jack"] = "16";
$employeeAges["Ryan"] = "35";
$employeeAges["Rachel"] = "46";
$employeeAges["Grace"] = "34";
foreach( $employeeAges as $key => $value){
echo "Name: $key, Age: $value <br />";
}
Display:
Name: Lisa, Age: 28
Name: Jack, Age: 16
Name: Ryan, Age: 35
Name: Rachel, Age: 46
Name: Grace, Age: 34
The syntax of the foreach statement is a little strange, so let's talk about it some.
Foreach Syntax: $something as $key => $value
This crazy statement roughly translates into: For each element of the
$employeeAges associative array I want to refer to the key as $key and the value as $value.
The operator "=>" represents the relationship between a key and value. You can imagine that
the key points => to the value. In our example we named the key $key and the value $value.
However, it might be easier to think of it as $name and $age. Below our example does this and notice how the output
is identical because we only changed the variable names that refer to the keys and values.
PHP Code:
$employeeAges;
$employeeAges["Lisa"] = "28";
$employeeAges["Jack"] = "16";
$employeeAges["Ryan"] = "35";
$employeeAges["Rachel"] = "46";
$employeeAges["Grace"] = "34";
foreach( $employeeAges as $name => $age){
echo "Name: $name, Age: $age <br />";
}
Display:
Name: Lisa, Age: 28
Name: Jack, Age: 16
Name: Ryan, Age: 35
Name: Rachel, Age: 46
Name: Grace, Age: 34
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