Associative Array From Multidimensional Array

Question

I am new to PHP an needed little help. It may be easy for some but giving me a tough time.

I have an array

Array ( [0] => page-18 [1] => page-20 )

Which I would like to explode further by '-':

$mainStringBrk = array('page-18', 'page-20');
$finalArray = array();
foreach($mainStringBrk as $bString){
    $mainStringBrkBrk = explode('-', $bString);
    $finalArray[$mainStringBrkBrk[0]] = $mainStringBrkBrk[1];
}
echo '<pre>'; print_r($finalArray);

When I do, it outputs only the last key and value of array.

Array ( page => 20 )

My desired output is:

Array ( page => 18, page => 20 )

I am wondering if anyone can guide me in right direction.

Answer 1

You can't achieve the result you want as it is not possible to have an array with identical keys; this is why you only have one result in your output. You could change your output structure to a 2-dimensional array to work around this eg

$mainStringBrk = array('page-18', 'page-20');
$finalArray = array();
foreach($mainStringBrk as $bString){
    $mainStringBrkBrk = explode('-', $bString);
    $finalArray[$mainStringBrkBrk[0]][] = $mainStringBrkBrk[1];
}
print_r($finalArray);

Output:

Array
(
    [page] => Array
        (
            [0] => 18
            [1] => 20
        )
)

Or you can adopt this structure if it is better suited to your needs:

$finalArray = array();
foreach($mainStringBrk as $bString){
    $mainStringBrkBrk = explode('-', $bString);
    $finalArray[] = array($mainStringBrkBrk[0] => $mainStringBrkBrk[1]);
}
print_r($finalArray);

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [page] => 18
        )
    [1] => Array
        (
            [page] => 20
        )
)

Demo on 3v4l.org