Array, Switch or something else. Can you point me in the right direction?

[siamiam]

Not sure how to approach this ...

 

I have a form where someone will select a city from a dropdown (over 80 cities currently, will be expanding to more).

 

Each city falls in one of three categories (i.e. small, medium, large).

 

After the user submits the form I need to determine what city the user selected and the size (small, medium, or large).

 

Should I store the size in an array for each city name? That sounds wrong to me; or is it?

 

I could use a switch statement I guess to check if 'New York' was selected and then set the city size to large, but that seems like excessive code also.

 

Am I close? If you could point me in the right direction so I could read up on it, that would be awesome.

 

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

 

[QuickOldCar]

You could do the switch statement or even an if/else.

 

I think the best way would be to make 3 arrays of small, medium, large, ..with your appropriate cities in each array.

 

Then do a check if in_array is ........

 

<?php
$small = array("city1", "city2", "city3", "city4");
$medium = array("city1", "city2", "city3", "city4");
$large = array("city1", "city2", "city3", "city4");

if (in_array($the_city, $small)) {
    echo "$the_city is small";
} elseif (in_array($the_city, $medium)) {
    echo "$the_city is medium";
} elseif  (in_array($the_city, $large)) {
    echo "$the_city is large";
} else {
   echo "$the_city size is unknown";
}
?>

 

Something like that should work with whatever results you may want to do versus the echo.

[siamiam]

Thanks so much for the help, I really appreciate it.

[QuickOldCar]

I wrote up a code specific for you.

 

It uses a text file for the array using a pipe to separate the city to size

 

demo here if would like to try it

http://get.blogdns.com/dynaindex/citysize/?city=altoona

 

<?php
//data.txt contains all city information. On each line is new york,large 
$city = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['city']);
$city = trim(strtolower($city));
?>

<form name="input" action="" method="get">
City <input type="text" name="city" value="<?php echo $city;?>" />
<input type="submit" value="See City Size" />
</form>

<?php
<?php
//data.txt contains all city information. On each line is new york,large 
$city = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['city']);
$city = trim(ucfirst(strtolower($city)));
?>

<form name="input" action="" method="get">
City <input type="text" name="city" value="<?php echo $city;?>" />
<input type="submit" value="See City Size" />
</form>

<?php
if (!isset($_GET['city']) || $city == ""){
echo "Insert a city name";
EXIT;
}

function get_size($string) {
    $pos = strrpos($string, '|');
    if($pos===false) {
        return false;
    } else {
        return substr($string, $pos+1);
    }
}

$my_file = "data.txt";
if (file_exists($my_file)) {
$data = file($my_file);
$check = "No";
foreach ($data as $line) {
if (preg_match("/$city/i", $line)) {
$check = "Yes";
}

}
if ($check != "Yes"){
echo "$city not found";
} else {
$line = trim($line);
$line = get_size($line);
echo "$city is $line size.<br />";
}


} else {
echo "No file to display";
}
?>

 

data.txt example  used (of course is not all cities or accurate data)

 

Abbeville|small

Adamsville|large

Addison|medium

Akron|large

Alabaster|small

Albertville|small

Alexander City|small

Aliceville|small

Allgood|medium

Altoona|large

Anderson|medium

 

 

 

 

 

[QuickOldCar]

oops, pasted that wrong somehow

 

<?php
//data.txt contains all city information. On each line is new york,large 
$city = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['city']);
$city = trim(strtolower($city));
?>

<form name="input" action="" method="get">
City <input type="text" name="city" value="<?php echo $city;?>" />
<input type="submit" value="See City Size" />
</form>

<?php

if (!isset($_GET['city']) || $city == ""){
echo "Insert a city name";
EXIT;
}

function get_size($string) {
    $pos = strrpos($string, '|');
    if($pos===false) {
        return false;
    } else {
        return substr($string, $pos+1);
    }
}

$my_file = "data.txt";
if (file_exists($my_file)) {
$data = file($my_file);
$check = "No";
foreach ($data as $line) {
if (preg_match("/$city/i", $line)) {
$check = "Yes";
}

}
if ($check != "Yes"){
echo "$city not found";
} else {
$line = trim($line);
$line = get_size($line);
echo "$city is $line size.<br />";
}


} else {
echo "No file to display";
}
?>

[Stooney]

If you're going to be adding more cities in the future, it would probably be best to store all of this data in a database.  Then you just use a simple query to determine the city size, and can have a quick little admin UI to add/edit cities in the list.

[QuickOldCar]

For what it's worth I redid this into selects that get the cities names from the same data.txt file.

 

Same link for demo

http://get.blogdns.com/dynaindex/citysize/

 

<?php
//data.txt contains all city information. On each line is  similar to new york,large or smallville,medium
$city = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['city']);
$city = trim($city);
$my_file = "data.txt";
if (file_exists($my_file)) {
$data = file($my_file);
?>
<form name="input" action="" method="get">
<select name="city">
<?php
foreach($data as $lines){
$info = explode("|",$lines);
$cities = ucwords(strtolower($info[0]));
echo "<option value='$cities'>$cities</option>";
  
}
?>

</select>
<input type="submit" value="Get Size" />
</form>

<?php

if (!isset($_GET['city']) || $city == ""){
echo "Insert a city name";
EXIT;
}

function get_size($string) {
    $pos = strrpos($string, '|');
    if($pos===false) {
        return false;
    } else {
        return substr($string, $pos+1);
    }
}

foreach ($data as $line) {
if (preg_match("/$city/i", $line)) {
$check = "Yes";
}

}
if ($check != "Yes"){
echo "$city not found";
} else {
$line = trim($line);
$line = get_size($line);
echo "$city is $line size.<br />";
}

} else {
echo "No file to display";
}
?>

[siamiam]

That's incredibly helpful; I can't thank you enough.

 

I feel like I know just enough to get into trouble and I'm never quite sure if I'm doing it the 'best way' ... so seeing someone else's approach is really insightful.