我的阵列设计应该如何？

Question

I think I messed up with my array design.

It currenlty looks like this:

 [new york] => Array
        (
            [id] => up
            [cinemas] => Array
                (
                    [AMC Loews 34th Street 14] => Array
                        (
                            [id] => 83
                            [lounges] => Array
                                (
                                    [FS 1] => 52
                                    [FS 2] => 70
                                )
                        )

                    [AMC Newport Centre 11] => Array
                        (
                            [id] => 159
                            [lounges] => Array
                                (
                                    [Royal 1] => 163
                                    [Royal 2] => 71
                                )
                        )

I thought I was smart when I sorted it like this. But it seems hard to fetch data from the array. I will always have the city name , in this ex new york . Fetching id for new york is going ok.

But say that for example I have id 83, and want to fetch name AMC Loews 34th Street 14 , how would i do that?

Answer 1

I'd recommend to build a second array as an index, holding the id s as keys, so you can look up the corresponding names:

$lookup = array(83 => 'AMC Loews 34th Street 14', 
                159 => 'AMC Newport Centre 11');

Then you can look up like this:

$array[$city]['cinemas'][$lookup[$id]];

On the other hand you might be better off to redesign the array alltogether. It depends on what the majority of your reads consists of. Do you usually have the names and citys or rather the id numbers? The other possibility is always to search with a loop, maybe like this:

foreach($array[$city]['cinemas'] as $name => $cin){
    if($name == $searchstring){
        $result = $cin['id'];
        break;
    }
}