PHP foreach echos a specific array item twice

Question

I take a PHP basics course in teamtreehouse.com and in this course I learn about PHP loops. Regarding PHP foreach loop, I wrote this code which works fine:

<?php

$items = array(
    'item1' => 'X',
    'item2' => 'Y',
);

foreach ($items as $item) {
    echo $item . "<br>";
}

X

Y

And yet, when I try to target a specific item after iterating foreach element this way:

foreach ($items as $item) {
    echo $items['item1'];
}

The output is XX instead just X .

My question is why I got XX in the first place and an answer could help me understand how to extract the specific value I want (the value of the first key-value pair - X ) with foreach .

Answer 1

There are 2 different things happening:

• printing the current value from the array for each iteration
• printing referring to the same item by key for each iteration

This array has 2 items:

$items = array(
    'item1' => 'X',
    'item2' => 'Y',
);

Now if you loop the array using a foreach , you can use your syntax like:

foreach ($items as $item) {
    echo $item . "<br>";
}

Now you are using $item , which is the current item in the foreach. In this case, this will print 2 different values for each iteration: "X" and "Y".

Now looking at the second part of your code:

foreach ($items as $item) {
    echo $items['item1'];
}

Now you are using $items['item1']; for each iteration. That means that you are referring to the item in $items with the key item1 which has the value of "X". That is why you are getting "X" and "X".

If you direclty want to get an item from the $items , you can do that like this:

$items["item1"];

If you want to use a foreach to get the item where the value is "X", and you know that the key is "item1", you could for example do it like this:

foreach ($items as $key => $item) {
    if ($key === "item1") {
        echo $item;
    }
}

Answer 2

You should know another usecase of foreach:

Foreach will loop every element in array, as well as every {key & value} element.

You can use following code:

$items = array(
    'item1' => 'X',
    'item2' => 'Y',
);

foreach ($items as $key => $value) {
    echo $key. ":" . $value . "<br>";
}

This will print

item1:X

item2:Y

Answer 3

For each item, as there is two item in the object(the loop is running two times), you're echoing the first item. That's why its showing "xx".

Answer 4

The foreach function iterates through an array as many times as the number of elements in array, which are 2 (first element is with key item1 and second element with key item2 ) here in your example.

The code to access first element in your array is $items['item1']; which upon print/echo will output the value at this key ( item1 ) which is X

Since the foreach function iterated twice, so it executed the code inside it twice as well, which in your case was printing a value X (hence printing two times at the end of iteration)

Just to extract the particular value you can use echo $items['item1'] ; (extracting value at item1 , for example) without foreach loop (since you donot require going through every element here in your array)

for instance, you can try the following code:

<?php

$items = array(
    'item1' => 'X',
    'item2' => 'Y',
);

echo $items['item1'];

which will have the following output

x

You will need to use foreach only in case when you need to go through all your array to execute some functionality, for accessing a specific element or even for just searching you don't need to use foreach as there are many better functions for arrays in php.

Answer 5

Here's why I got XX from my code.

<?php

$items = array(
    'item1' => 'X',
    'item2' => 'Y',
);

foreach ($items as $item) {
    echo $items['item1'];
}

With the expression echo $items['item1']; I dictated the loop to negate 'item2' . Thus, it treats only to data in the index of 'item1' , but given the echo is for both the first value of $items and ['item1'] itself, the value is printed twice: Once as a variable expansion of the first value of $items , and second, as from expanding its first value itself with ['item1'] .

This is just how the foreach function of PHP is built.

To affirm this philosophy I did:

$items = array(
    'item1' => 'X',
    'item2' => 'Y',
    'item3' => 'Z',
);

foreach ($items as $item) {
    echo $items['item1'];   
}

And got: XXX .