calling PHP multi dimensional arrays outside of foreach loop - php

Question

I have an app that records months and years by one CSV entry, i.e. db column named answer1 is jan,2008 and column answer2 is feb,2013. I want to use a specific month (jan) in html but it only gives me the last array data.
<?php
foreach ($row as $colName => $colValue )
{
if($colName === answer1 || $colName === answer2)
{
//break apart date data
$myArray = explode(',', $colValue);
echo '<div id=" ' .$colName . $myArray[0] . ' ">test</div> ';//this works
};
};
?>
I'd like something like this in another php block later in the doc.
<?php echo '<div id=" '.$colName[answer2] . $myArray[0] . ' ">test</div> ';?>

Answer 1

This is probably a lot easier. We're exploding (or pulling two substrings) from the original columns in MySQL before we get to PHP. Then you can use them however you would like:
$query = "SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(answer1,',',1) as a1_month,
SUBSTRING_INDEX(answer1,',',-1) as a1_year,
SUBSTRING_INDEX(answer2,',',1) as a2_month,
SUBSTRING_INDEX(answer2,',',-1) as a2_year from my_table";
$result = mysqli_query($query);
$answers = array();
$x = 0;
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)){
$answers[$x]['answer1_year'] = $row['a1_year'];
$answers[$x]['answer1_month'] = $row['a1_month'];
$answers[$x]['answer2_year'] = $row['a2_year'];
$answers[$x]['answer2_month'] = $row['a2_month'];
$x++;
}
print_r($answers);
If for some reason you still want the concatenated strings you can do this:
$answer1 = $answers[0]['answer1_month'].','.$answers[0]['answer1_year'];
$answer2 = $answers[0]['answer2_month'].','.$answers[0]['answer2_year'];