Outputting dates in to a table padding missing dates in order - php

Question

My array from a database looks like this:
$client[0]['Name'] = 'Foo';
$client[0]['Claim'][0]['year'] = 2013;
$client[0]['Claim'][1]['year'] = 2014;
$client[0]['Claim'][2]['year'] = 2015;
$client[1]['Name'] = 'Bar';
// no 2013!
$client[1]['Claim'][0]['year'] = 2014;
$client[1]['Claim'][1]['year'] = 2015;
// table headers are name, 2013, 2014, 2015...
foreach($client as $c) {
echo '<tr>';
echo '<td>' . $c['Client']['name'] . '</td>';
foreach($c['Claim'] as $claim) :
echo '<td>' . $claim['year'] . '</td>';
endforeach;
echo '</tr>';
}
Which works fine except when a $client is missing a year then the <td> are not balanced; causing my table to be incorrect.
My goal is to have each $claim['Year'] line up with the appropriate table heading.
I figured I could just add empty keys to each array and re-order them but that seems a bit unnecessary and wondered if there was a better way of doing it.
So an array might look
this would be ideal:
$years[null, 2014, 2015]
whereas currently it is
$years[2014,2015]
Hope this makes sense.

Answer 1

I am assuming you have a start and an end year that you want to display the claims for. Then if you replace the inner for loop with this I think it should work:
$x = 0; //Variable to keep track of what claim we are on.
//Loop through the years.
for($i=$start; $i<=$stop; $i++) {
//If there is a claim for this year, echo it and move on to the next claim.
if($c['Claim'][$x]['year'] == $i) {
echo '<td>' . $c['Claim'][$x]['year'] . '</td>';
$x++;
}
//If not, just echo an empty table cell.
else {
echo '<td></td>';
}
}
This only works if the claims are sorted by year. Please note that I have not tested the code.