PHP: How to use two dimensional array to display menu? - php

Question

I think I'm picking this up pretty well, but I'm just stuck on this. I want to display this menu using an array and foreach loop:
<img src="/img/page-icons/credit-card21.png" />Payments
<a target="_blank" href="/cloud"><img src="/img/page-icons/upload123.png" />Cloud</a>
<a target="_blank" href="/portal"><img src="/img/page-icons/earth208.png" />Portal</a>
So to do that I need to turn that into this line in PHP:
echo '<img src="/img/page-icons/' . $image . '" />' . $title . '';
To fill that out in the loop we need to create something like this... which is where I'm stuck:
foreach( $stamp as $link => $target ){
echo '<a href="/' . $link . '" target="' . $target . '">';
foreach( $stamp[] as $title => $image ){
echo '<img src="/img/page-icons/' . $image . '" />' . $title;
}
echo '</a>';
}
I don't really know how to go about the above, just been messing around with it for a while today. I also don't want to always display target="' . $target . '" on every link.
The array would probably be a two dimensional array? Something like this any way:
$stamp = array(
'link' => array('title' => 'image'),
'link' => array('title' => 'image'),
'link' => array('title' => 'image')
);
EDIT:
There's some confusion of what 'target' is, I want to echo 4 values from an array into a link, target is one of the values. I didn't know how to use that in the array so I just left it out.

Answer 1

When you do:
foreach( $stamp as $link => $target )
The $link variable contains the string "link" and the $target variable is an array such as ['title' => 'image'].
What you should probably do is have an array like this:
// Init links
$links = array();
// Add links
$links[] = array(
'title' => 'My Title',
'href' => 'http://www.google.com',
'target' => '_blank',
'image' => 'image.png',
);
foreach ($links as $link)
{
echo '<a href="'.$link['href'].'" target="'.$link['target'].'">';
echo '<img src="/img/page-icons/' . $link['image'] . '" />';
echo $link['title'];
echo '</a>';
}
This is a bit more flexible approach that lets you add other data items to the structure in the future. That $links array could easily be generated in a loop if you have a different data source such as a database as well.
EDIT
To answer your further question, you can prefix the link building with a set of sane defaults like this:
foreach ($links as $link)
{
// Use the ternary operator to specify a default if empty
$href = empty($link['href']) ? '#' : $link['href'];
$target = empty($link['target']) ? '_self' : $link['target'];
$image = empty($link['image']) ? 'no-icon.png' : $link['image'];
$title = empty($link['title']) ? 'Untitled' : $link['title'];
// Write link
echo "<a href='$href' target='$target'>";
echo "<img src='/img/page-icons/$image' />";
echo $title;
echo "</a>";
}

Answer 2

you can set your array like:
$stamp = array(
'0' => array('title'=>$title 'image'=>$image,'link'=>$link,'target'=>$target),
'1' => array('title'=>$title, 'image'=>$image,'link'=>$link,,'target'=>$target),
'2' => array('title'=>$title 'image'=>$image,'link'=>$link,'target'=>$target)
);
and in foreach you can write
$i=0;
foreach( $stamp as $st=> $target ){
echo '<a href="/' . $st['link'] . '" target="' . $st['target'] . '">';
echo '<img src="/img/page-icons/' . $st['image'] . '" />' . $st['title'];
echo '</a>';
}