3 Dimensional Associative Array to HTML table - php

Question

This is what my array looks like.
(int) Year 1 => array(
'Department 1' => array(
'Sales' => '12345'
),
'Department 2' => array(
'Sales' => '12345'
),
),
(int) Year 2 => array(
'Department 1' => array(
'Sales' => '12345'
),
'Department 2' => array(
'Sales' => '12345'
),
)
I want to be able to create a table where the headers are the Years on the X axis.
The Y axis needs to start with the Department name. The adjoining cells need to have sales, revenue, and total in one cell.
It should look like this...
Department____| ___YEAR1_______ | __Year2
Department 1 |Sales [dept 1][year 1] | Sales[dept 1][year 2]
Department 2 |Sales [dept 2][year 1] | Sales [dept 2][year 2]
I used nested foreach loops
foreach($List as $key=>$row) {
echo "<tr><td>".$key."</td>";
foreach($row as $key2=>$col){
echo "<td>" . 'Sales: '.round($col['sales'],2) ."</td>";
}
echo "</tr>";
}
echo "</table>"; ?>
but it printed the table with departments names on top on the x axis and years on the y axis. How do I get years on the x axis and departments on the y axis.

Answer 1

The problem is that the dimensions of your array don't correspond with the order that you want to iterate through them for your table. You need to pull out the keys explicitly to iterate through them in the nested loops.
$years = array_keys($List);
// Print column headings
echo "<table><thead><tr><th>Department</th>";
foreach ($years as $year) {
echo "<th>$year</th>";
}
echo "</tr></thead>";
// Print data rows
echo "<tbody>"
foreach (array_keys($List[$years[0]]) as $dept) {
echo "<tr><th>$dept</th>";
foreach ($years as $year) {
echo "<td>{$List[$year][$dept]['Sales'}]</td>";
}
echo "</tr>";
}
echo "</tbody></table>";
As I mentioned, this depends on all years having the same departments. If you add new departments over time, it won't work. You can fix this by using array_reduce to merge all the department lists, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.