PHP multidimensional array not giving output - php

Question

I've tried to display this information tons of times, i've looked all over stackoverflow and just can't find an answer, this isn't a duplicate question, none of the solutions on here work. I've a json array which is stored as a string in a database, when it's taken from the database it's put into an array using json_decode and looks like this
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[0] => Array
(
)
[1] => Array
(
[CanViewAdminCP] => Array
(
[Type] => System
[Description] => Grants user access to view specific page
[Colour] => blue
)
)
)
)
However, when i try to loop through this, it just returns nothing, I've tried looping using keys, i've tried foreach loops, nothing is returning the values, I'm looking to get the Array key so "CanViewAdminCP" and then the values inside that key such as "Type" and "Description".
Please can anybody help? thankyou.

Answer 1

Use a recursive function to search for the target key CanViewAdminCP recursively, as follows:
function find_value_by_key($haystack, $target_key)
{
$return = false;
foreach ($haystack as $key => $value)
{
if ($key === $target_key) {
return $value;
}
if (is_array($value)) {
$return = find_value_by_key($value, $target_key);
}
}
return $return;
}
Example:
print_r(find_value_by_key($data, 'CanViewAdminCP'));
Array
(
[Type] => System
[Description] => Grants user access to view specific page
[Colour] => blue
)
Visit this link to test it.

Answer 2

You have a 4 level multidimensional array (an array containing an array containing an array containing an array), so you will need four nested loops if you want to iterate over all keys/values.
This will output "System" directly:
<?php echo $myArray[0][1]['CanViewAdminCP']['Type']; ?>
[0] fetches the first entry of the top level array
[1] fetches the second entry of that array
['CanViewAdminCP'] fetches that keyed value of the third level array
['Type'] then fetches that keyed value of the fourth level array
Try this nested loop to understand how nested arrays work:
foreach($myArray as $k1=>$v1){
echo "Key level 1: ".$k1."\n";
foreach($v1 as $k2=>$v2){
echo "Key level 2: ".$k2."\n";
foreach($v2 as $k3=>$v3){
echo "Key level 3: ".$k3."\n";
}
}
}

Answer 3

Please consider following code which will not continue after finding the first occurrence of the key, unlike in Tommassos answer.
<?php
$yourArray =
array(
array(
array(),
array(
'CanViewAdminCP' => array(
'Type' => 'System',
'Description' => 'Grants user access to view specific page',
'Colour' => 'blue'
)
),
array(),
array(),
array()
)
);
$total_cycles = 0;
$count = 0;
$found = 0;
function searchKeyInMultiArray($array, $key) {
global $count, $found, $total_cycles;
$total_cycles++;
$count++;
if( isset($array[$key]) ) {
$found = $count;
return $array[$key];
} else {
foreach($array as $elem) {
if(is_array($elem))
$return = searchKeyInMultiArray($elem, $key);
if(!is_null($return)) break;
}
}
$count--;
return $return;
}
$myDesiredArray = searchKeyInMultiArray($yourArray, 'CanViewAdminCP');
print_r($myDesiredArray);
echo "<br>found in depth ".$found." and traversed ".$total_cycles." arrays";
?>