More efficient way of writing PHP

Question

What would be the best way to write this block of PHP instead of listing each number??

  <?php     $name1      = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'ch_client_name1', TRUE);
            $name2      = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'ch_client_name2', TRUE);
            $name3      = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'ch_client_name3', TRUE);
            $name4      = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'ch_client_name4', TRUE);
            $name5      = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'ch_client_name5', TRUE);

            ?>

And here is the HTML that I will be using. So I will want the list to display each of the 5 names.

            <li id="<?php the_ID(); ?>" ">
                  <?php echo $name1; ?> 
            </li>

Answer 1

This will work:

for($i=1;$i<=5;$i++){
    ${'name'.$i} = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'ch_client_name'.$i, TRUE);
}

Answer 2

$names = array('ch_client_name1', 'ch_client_name2', 'ch_client_name3', 'ch_client_name4', 'ch_client_name5' )
foreach($names as $name) {
    $realname = get_post_meta(get_the_ID()), $name, TRUE);
    echo '<li id="'. theID() .'">'. $realname .'</li>';
}

Answer 3

You can do like it:

<?php

  for($i = 1; $i <= 5; $i++) {
    $nameN = "name{$i}";
    $$nameN = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), "ch_client_name{$i}", TRUE);
    // or $name[$i], if you can

    ?>
      <li id="<?php the_ID(); ?>">
        <?php echo $$nameN; ?> 
      </li>
    <?php
  }

Answer 4

<?php
$numberOfNames=5;
$names = array();
for($i=1; $i<=$numberOfNames; $i++)
    $names[] = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'ch_client_name'.$i, TRUE);
foreach($names as $k=>$name){
    echo "<li id=\"".($k+1)."\">\n$name\n</li>";
}
?>

Answer 5

You might even want to consider using this, which gets all post meta (custom) fields at once:

$meta = get_post_custom( $post_id = get_the_ID() );
for( $i = 1; $i <= 5; $i++ )
  echo '<li id="client-'.$post_id.'-'.$i.'">'.$meta["ch_client_name{$i}"].'</li>';

Note I also fixed an error in the question when he asked for this:

<li id="<?php the_ID(); ?>" ">

The problems I fixed were:

• HTML @id attributes cannot start with a number (so I prefixed with "client-{$post_id}-" ) , and
• the_ID() returns the post ID for each of the five (5) results instead of having a unique value that is required for @id attributes.