How do I name these PHP arrays? - php

Question

Lets say I need three arrays, ford, chevy and dodge. Each array has three items:
$ford['engine'] = 'something';
$ford['color'] = 'something';
$ford['price'] = 'something';
$chevy['engine'] = 'something';
$chevy['color'] = 'something';
$chevy['price'] = 'something';
$dodge['engine'] = 'something';
$dodge['color'] = 'something';
$dodge['price'] = 'something';
I can write that out no problem and it doesn't take too long. But, lets say I need fifty or sixty arrays that I need to make, all with ten to twenty different items. I want to put a variable at the top of each array's file to denote what the array name will be, but I am not quite clear on the syntax and I am not too familiar with $$ or how I would use that with arrays:
$name = 'ford';
$(I want this to be "$name")['engine'] = 'something';
$(I want this to be "$name")['color'] = 'something';
$(I want this to be "$name")['price'] = 'something';
I have also considered just doing this:
$name = 'ford';
$view[$name.'_engine']
$view[$name.'_color']
$view[$name.'_price']
Can I get some suggestions on the best way to approach this?

Answer 1

Write a small function to do that
$cars = array(); //Create an array to hold the values
function writeArray($car, $var1, $var2, $var3) {
global $cars;
$cars[$car] = array('engine' => $var1, 'color' => $var2, 'price' => $var2);
}
//Now use it like
writeArray('Chevy', $something, $something, $something);
//If you want to access the array in the form of $ford['engine'] then use this
extract($cars); //This will split the array into small array accessible by model

Answer 2

You can use variable variables:
$var = 'ford';
$$var['engine'] = '...';
$$var['color'] = '...';
$var = 'chevy';
$$var['engine'] = '...';
$$var['color'] = '...';
Or just use multidimensional array:
$cars = array();
$make = 'ford';
$cars[$make] = array();
$cars[$make]['engine'] = '...';
$cars[$make]['color'] = '...';
// or
$cars['ford'] = array(
'engine' => '...',
'color' => '...',
);