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.
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.
We have an associative array that stores the names of people as the keys with the values being their age.
We want to know how old everyone is at work.
Foreach loop to print out everyone's name and age.
$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 />";
}
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.
above 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.
$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 />";
}
Name: Jack, Age: 16
Name: Ryan, Age: 35
Name: Rachel, Age: 46
Name: Grace, Age: 34
Note For more detail please see Php Manual at http://www.php.net