PHP / Wordpress Loop - Creating a separator - php

Question

I have the following function which grabs and displays the categories associated with the post, which works perfect however i want to place separators between them and not 100% sure how to achieve this. Can anyone lend me a hand?
CAT1 CAT2 CAT3
ideally would like to have like:
CAT1 / CAT2 / CAT3
Notice no seperator on the last one
PHP
<ul class="inline-list">
<?php
$id = get_the_ID();
$cats = get_the_category($id);
foreach ( $cats as $cat ):
?>
<li><?php echo $cat->name; ?></li>
<?php
endforeach;
?>
<li><?php FoundationPress_entry_meta(); ?></li>
</ul>

Answer 1

As explained by others, CSS would be the prefered way. But if you really want to do this in PHP, you could save the html code for the list to a variable, either by concatenation or output buffering:
ob_start();
foreach ( $cats as $cat ) {
echo '<li>'.$cat->name.' /</li>';
}
$list = ob_get_clean();
Then you could remove the last 7 characters (" /</li>") using the substr function and put "</li>" back before outputting the code:
echo substr($list, 0, -7).'</li>;

Answer 2

mikemike's answer is a perfect solution but if for some reason you want to do it using code you could try this.
<ul class="inline-list">
<?php
$id = get_the_ID();
$cats = get_the_category($id);
$count = 1;
foreach ( $cats as $cat ):
?>
<li><?php echo $cat->name; ?> </li>
<?php
if($count < count($cats)):
echo '/';
endif;
$count++;
endforeach;
?>
<li><?php FoundationPress_entry_meta(); ?></li>
</ul>

Answer 3

To do this in your code you can simply do the following:
<ul class="inline-list">
<?php
$id = get_the_ID();
$cats = get_the_category($id);
foreach ( $cats as $cat ):
?>
<li><?php echo $cat->name; ?></li>
<?php
endforeach;
?>
<li class="no-border"><?php FoundationPress_entry_meta(); ?></li>
</ul>
CSS:
ul.inline-list li{
border-right:1px solid #eee;
}
ul.inline-list li.no-border{
border-right:none;
}
Alternatively, you can achieve this using nth-child, first-child or last-child CSS selectors.
For example:
ul.inline-list li {
border-left:1px solid #eee;
}
ul.inline-list li:first-child{
border-left:none;
}
This code sets a light-grey border to the left of all the lis. The second statement then removes the border from the first li.
The same can be achieved with border-right and last-child (removing the border from the last li).
In both cases you can use CSS for the separator, whether that's a border, a background or by using before to add a / character.

Answer 4

You can count how many iterations you have done, and if less that the total, output the separator:
$count = count($cats);
$i = 0;
foreach ( $cats as $cat ):?>
<li>
<?php echo $cat->name; ?>
<?php echo ++$i < $count ? '/' : '';?>
</li>
<?php endforeach;
Live example: http://codepad.viper-7.com/7QU7x9

Answer 5

If you solely want to do this in php, I'd change from a foreach loop to a for loop, then you can decipher between the two.
IE:
$length = count($cat);
for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
$cat = $cats[i];
if ($i + 1 == $length) {?>
<li><?php echo $cat->name; ?></li>
<?php } else { ?>
<li><?php echo $cat->name; ?> / </li>
<?php }
}