Echo nested array's with foreach PHP - php

Question

I have seen many similar issues but none that can help explain my issue.
I have an array called cities, with a nested array for the state that has the cities of that state. It looks like this:
$cities = array(
"ca" => array(
"los-angeles" => "Los Angeles"
),
"wa" => array(
"bellingham" => "Bellingham",
"seattle" => "Seattle",
"tacoma" => "Tacoma"
)
);
My PHP code to display many HTML select fields:
<?php
foreach ($cities as $state) {
echo "<select name='city' id='" . $state . "'>";
foreach ($state as $city => $name) {
echo "<option value='" . $city . "'>" . $name . "</option>";
}
}
?>
The id of the select is always Array. How can I use the key, like "ca" or "wa"?

Answer 1

The problem is that you should be using the array key for the select on the states. Here is my revision of your code. Note that I explicitly have named state_key and state_value as well as city_key and city_value. Naming things explicitly like this helps in debugging. I also added a closing </select> element so the content renders correctly.
foreach ($cities as $state_key => $state_value) {
echo "<select name='city' id='" . $state_key . "'>";
foreach ($state_value as $city_key => $city_value) {
echo "<option value='" . $city_key . "'>" . $city_value . "</option>";
}
echo "</select>";
}

Answer 2

That's because the first foreach loop is going over an array of arrays. So each member is going to be an array. If you had id ='" . $state[0] you would see the first member of said array.
the var_dump function is your friend.
You could get all the cities by using array_keys function.

Answer 3

foreach ($cities as $key=>$state) {
echo "<select name='city' id='" . $key . "'>";
foreach ($state as $city => $name) {
echo "<option value='" . $city . "'>" . $name . "</option>";
}
}
change to this
in your case $state is an array containing cities. so it is always showing the value as Array().

Answer 4

Try uisng echo "<select name='city' id='" . $state['los-angeles'] . "'>"; instead of echo "<select name='city' id='" . $state . "'>";
If you want ca as your select element id then use below one,
foreach ($cities as $key=>$state) {
echo "<select name='city' id='" . $key . "'>";
foreach ($state as $city => $name) {
echo "<option value='" . $city . "'>" . $name . "</option>";
}
}
If you want like los-angeles as id of your select element, then use below one
foreach ($cities as $key=>$state) {
$SelectId = strtolower(str_replace(" ",'-',$state['los-angeles']));
echo "<select name='city' id='" . $SelectId . "'>";
foreach ($state as $city => $name) {
echo "<option value='" . $city . "'>" . $name . "</option>";
}
}