Can you tell my why this doesn't work?

[CyberShot]

I had a simple array I was playing with. I wanted to number the output so that it would look like this

 

1. item one

2. item two

3. item three

4. item four

 

and so on.

 

so made a for loop that output my array just fine and tried doing this inside the for loop

$counter = 0; // this is outside the loop

//inside
echo $counter += 1 . '. ' . $myArray[$i] . '<br />'; 

what that gave me was

 

1234

 

instead of

 

1. item one

2. item two

3. item three

4. item four

 

however, when I separated it like so

echo $counter += 1;
echo '. ' . $myArray[$i] . '<br />'; 

it works just fine. Why is that?

 

[Jacques1]

Because of operator precedence. Concatenation binds stronger than assignments, so PHP first builds the string

1 . '. ' . $myArray[$i] . '<br />';

and then "adds" that string to the counter, which discards everything but the leading 1.

 

Of course the real answer is: Don't do this. Precedence is tricky enough (parentheses can help here), but when the expressions also have side effects, even a seemingly simple piece of code can lead to all kinds of bugs. Don't try to save lines of code.

[CyberShot]

Thank you.