PHP: How to create a good foreach shorthand? - php

Question

I have a simple object (or array) like this...
stdClass Object (
[people] => Array
(
[0] => stdClass Object (
[name] => 'John',
[age] => 50,
)
[0] => stdClass Object (
[name] => 'Martin',
[age] => 47,
)
)
And I can easily loop through it using foreach like this
foreach ($people as $person) {
echo $person->name . '<br>';
}
But I would somehow like to have a shorter way to echo all names with something like this...
print_each($people->name)
And it would do exactly the same thing with only 1 short line of code as my 3 lines of foreach code did.
Is there a function like this or how would we go about creating a function like that?

Answer 1

You can use array_column and implode.
echo implode("<br>\n", array_column($arr, "name"));

Answer 2

Probably array_map is the closest to what you want.
array_map(function($person) { echo $person->name; }, $people);

Answer 3

Shortest way and not that ugly would be to add a
__toString
Method to the Person Object like this:
class Person {
public $name;
public function __toString()
{
return (string) $this->name;
}
}
This then enables you to use the very super short:
array_walk($people, 'printf');
Syntax.

Answer 4

If you have array, you can use array_column for that:
$people = [
['name' => 'John', 'age' => 3],
['name' => 'Carl', 'age' => 43]
];
var_dump(
array_column($people, 'name')
);
/*
array(2) {
[0]=>
string(4) "John"
[1]=>
string(4) "Carl"
}

Answer 5

Since PHP 7.4 you can do:
echo implode('', array_map(fn($person) => $person->name . '<br>', $people));
The inner array_map() function takes as second parameter your initial array $people.
The inner array_map() function takes as first parameter an arrow function fn() => that gets the single items $person out of your initial array $people
inside the arrow function each $person->name gets concated with '<br>' and written as value in a new array.
this new array will be returned by the array_map() function
The items of this array will be passed as second parameter to the implode() function and glued together with the empty string ''.
the entire string that implode() returns gets echoed out

Answer 6

If you want to get "smart" about it you can write something like this:
array_walk_recursive($a, function($v, $k) {echo $k === 'name' ? $v : '';});
But being smart over readability is a bad idea, always.

Answer 7

If I had to write a function to do that, it would be something along these lines:
function print_each($collection, $property) {
foreach ($collection as $item) {
echo $item->$property . "<br />";
}
}
Which could be used like so:
$people = [
(object)[
"name" => "Bob",
"age" => 25
],
(object)[
"name" => "Dan",
"age" => 31
],
(object)[
"name" => "Sally",
"age" => 45
]
];
print_each($people, "name"); // prints "Bob<br />Dan<br />Sally<br />"