[SOLVED] ForEach() has defeated me

[law]

$string = "Hello this is a string";
$string = explode(" ", $string);
foreach ($string as $key => &$a){
echo $a[0];
}

 

outputs : "Htias" <-- The fist letter of each key from the array

 

I want $a to contain the entire array piece. $a[0] == $string[0] . Not just the first letter of the array piece. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong. I could not find this issue in the PHP manual, but 80% of that manual is far beyond my comprehension.

 

Should I just do a for loop and manually advance the pointer?

[Maq]

Just echo out the value, you're already looping through the result from explode.

 

echo $a;

[Ken2k7]

Well a string is an array of characters.

 

$e = 'abc';
echo $e[0];

 

That gives "a".

 

You should just use $a instead of $a[0]. Also, why do you have a reference & next to $a?

 

Wouldn't the foreach loop advance to the next array entry for you?

[law]

wow.. i hate when an answer is that simple! Thank you guys..

 

As Per the & question:

I thought i read in the manual that "&" created a pointer to the original $string variable rather then creating a duplicate string. In my actual code my string is a few thousand characters long. I was trying to minimize the impact on my servers ram/cpu. Am I really far off on that concept? I would love any thoughts on how to do this? Because this forloop will be running every 5 seconds to sort massive amounts of data.

[lispwriter]

since you exploded by spaces, the variable $string is an array of 5 elements, each array element is a single word from your initial string.  so $string[0] would hold the value "Hello".

 

within the foreach loop, $a holds the value of a single element from your $string array, one at a time.  so on the first iteration $a holds the value "Hello".  on the second it holds "this" and so on.  also in a foreach loop, unless you need the key values, you can simplify what you wrote like this:

foreach($string as $a) { ... }

 

also, as mentioned, it's probably not necessary to use the & operator to pass those values by reference however it couldn't hurt if you're dealing with massive amounts of data as you said.

 

hope that helps.

[law]

wow thank you for the time to put it into plain english LispWriter .. I really appreciate the help guys