Counting multidimensional array rows and their respective elements? - php

Question

I'm doing something that is perhaps too long and strange to explain, but basically I've mapped a string in a complex way into an array in a way to make them jumbled up. This is an example of how it would look:
field[26][25]='x';
field[24][23]='z';
field[28][29]='y';
Now that I've successfully jumbled up the string in exactly the way I wanted, I need to reconstruct the linear result.
So I need to take row 1 of the array, and loop through all the elements in this row to combine them into a string. Then do the same thing with row 2 and so on to create one massive linear string.
How do I count how many rows and elements in those rows I have? For the life of me I cant even begin to find how to do this for multid arrays.
Kind regards

Answer 1

#u_mulder's got a solid answer there. For the number of elements, you'd just say:
$total = 0;
foreach( $matrix as $row ) $total += count($row);
For the concatenation of elements, you'd just say:
$concat = '';
foreach( $matrix as $row ) $concat .= implode('', $row);
Bob's your uncle. But really, is there a valid use case for such a strange mashup?

Answer 2

$field[26][25]='x';
$field[24][23]='z';
$field[28][29]='y';
$field_string = '';
array_walk_recursive ( $field , function($item, $key) use (&$field_string){
if(!is_array($item)){
$field_string .= $item;
}
});
echo $field_string;
Honestly, this is a little confusing. I may need more info but let me know if this helps

Answer 3

You can start with an empty string and use two nested foreach to iterate over lines and items on each line and append each item to the string:
$result = '';
foreach ($fields as $row) {
foreach ($row as $item) {
$result .= $item;
}
}
Or you can replace the entire inner foreach with $result .= implode('', $row);.
You can even replace the outer foreach with a call to array_map() then implode() the array produced by array_map() into a string:
$string = implode(
'',
array_map(
function (array $items) {
return implode('', $items);
},
$fields
)
);