Reset variable at each iteration of PHP foreach loop - php

Question

I'm essentially using a foreach loop to loop through some post categories and then output some markup for the posts in each category. I thought my variable $ii would get reset at each iteration of the foreach, but it caries over (silly assumption on my part). I do need $ii=1 at the beginning of each loop, is there a way to accomplish this? Basic code structure below
$cats = array(
'cat1' => 20,
'cat2' => 21,
'cat3' => 22,
'cat4' => 23
);
foreach($cats as $cat){
$ii = 1;
$cat_name = get_cat_name($cat);
echo "<div class='container'>
<h1>$cat_name</h1>
";
while( have_posts() ) : the_post();
$title = get_the_title() . ' ' . $ii;
if( in_category($cat) ){
echo "<p>$title</p>";
}
$ii++; endwhile;
echo '</div>'; // end container
}
For three posts in each category, what's being outputted is, essentially:
Cat1
- title 1
- title 2
- title 3
Cat2
- title 4
- title 5
- title 6
etc.
My desired output is:
Cat1
- title 1
- title 2
- title 3
Cat2
- title 1
- title 2
- title 3
Is there a way to reset the variable for each iteration to achieve my desired output? Or a better way to do this? Haven't been able to find anything on it yet. Seems pretty simple, though. Thank you in advance!
EDIT:
A bunch of the answers on here got something working, but scoping the counter to a condition helped me solve the issues I needed. Kind of a workaround, but I basically just needed to check if I was on the 5th iteration of the while loop in a specific category to output a certain block of markup for a special case. (Sorry if the way I posed the question left my objective a little bit ambiguous, there's a lot going on in the actual loops I'm running - I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.) So, as of now, the workaround looks like so:
if( $cat == $cats['cat2']){
$ii++;
if($ii === 5){
echo '<hr>';
}
}
Still feel like there's a more robust way of accomplishing this and I'm open to new ideas for it, but it's working for now!

Answer 1

Not sure what's going on inside those functions of yours but try building your $title variable inside your in_category() condition check
if (in_category($cat)) {
$title = get_the_title() . ' ' . $ii;
echo "<p>$title</p>";
$ii++;
}
It looks like your functions for grabbing posts are re-grabbing every post again and only outputting the ones you need based on the value of $cat, via in_category(). Your $ii counter should be resetting just fine since you are explicitly setting it to 1 at the beginning of each foreach iteration.

Answer 2

You could increment a different counter inside the while loop then increment the other counter after the while loop ends:
$counter = 1;
while( have_posts() ) : the_post();
$title = get_the_title() . ' ' . $counter;
if( in_category($cat) ){
echo "<p>$title</p>";
}
$counter++;
endwhile;
$ii++;