[SOLVED] working with arrays - storing lots of information?

[citricsquid]

Hi,

 

I work lots with mysql and stuff and I've never actually learned about arrays indepth and now I need to know and I'm totally lost. I'm not sure if it's possible but it's worth asking. I have form data that I want to manipulate, normally I'd just chuck it in a database and play with that but this doesn't require it and I'd rather not use a database unless I have to.

 

The following is entirely hypothetical, I just want to learn. There is a form, in it the user would enter:

 

Name, price, hair colour and favourite food.

 

They would then click submit and be taken to the processing page, now on this page I want to manipulate their entered data, I could always just do $name = ... etc, but I'd rather use an array because they could be entering 100 people.

 

How do I store multiple values in an array? So I want to store the name, price, hair colour and favourite food in a single array. Is this possible and how would I go about it?

[Adam]

Well yeah, easily possible. Have you actually read up on arrays at all?

 

http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.array.php

[Garethp]

$Array['Name'] = 'Name';

$Array['Price'] = 'Price';

$Array['HairColor'] = 'Hair Color';

$Array['FavoriteFood'] = 'Favorite Food';

 

Get it?

[citricsquid]

oh I understand all this, but what I want to do is have multiple values for a single array value. Sorry if I explained it wrong, I'm really bad with explaining.

 

I want to have $person['bob'] contain ALL the above values and be able to call them easily, but I just realised this probably isn't the correct way? Should I be setting up a new variable for each person? So $person1['name'] = 'bob', $person2['name'] = 'john'?

 

 

[Garethp]

No

 

$Person['bob'][['Name'] = "Name";

$Person['bob'][Price'] = "Price";

 

See what I'm doing? It's called a Two Dimensional Array

[Adam]

How exactly are they entering the data? You say they could enter up to 100 people, what would your form look like?

[citricsquid]

No

 

$Person['bob'][['Name'] = "Name";

$Person['bob'][Price'] = "Price";

 

See what I'm doing? It's called a Two Dimensional Array

 

Brilliant, thankyou! I'll try that out now, this seems to be what I need.

 

edit: I have no idea how I looked over this, I spent 3 hours trying to work it out and this is the obvious solution, cheers!