PHP: How to create a good foreach shorthand?

Question

I have a simple object (or array) like this...

stdClass Object ( [people] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [name] => 'John', [age] => 50, ) [0] => stdClass Object ( [name] => 'Martin', [age] => 47, ) )

And I can easily loop through it using foreach like this

foreach ($people as $person) { echo $person->name . '<br>'; }

But I would somehow like to have a shorter way to echo all names with something like this...

print_each($people->name)

And it would do exactly the same thing with only 1 short line of code as my 3 lines of foreach code did.

Is there a function like this or how would we go about creating a function like that?

why? readability should never be underestimated. if you must, write a function/method. — DevDonkey
– DevDonkey, Commented Sep 12, 2018 at 14:12
For testing/debugging purpuses. How to write a function like that? — Martin Zeltin
– Martin Zeltin, Commented Sep 12, 2018 at 14:13

Don't Panic · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-12 14:14:40Z

6

You can use array_column and implode.

echo implode("<br>\n", array_column($arr, "name"));

edited Sep 12, 2018 at 14:14

Don't Panic

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answered Sep 12, 2018 at 14:09

Andreas

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Don't Panic · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-12 14:07:22Z

5

Probably array_map is the closest to what you want.

array_map(function($person) { echo $person->name; }, $people);

answered Sep 12, 2018 at 14:07

Don't Panic

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2 Comments

Martin Zeltin Over a year ago

stil too long, can we write a shorter function?

Don't Panic Over a year ago

Sure! How about array_map(function($p) { echo $p->name; }, $people); ;-)

gries · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-12 14:37:10Z

Shortest way and not that ugly would be to add a __toString Method to the Person Object like this:

class Person { public $name; public function __toString() { return (string) $this->name; } }

This then enables you to use the very super short:

array_walk($people, 'printf');

Syntax.

Looks like they're just StdClass objects in this case, but in general I think it's a good idea!

Justinas · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-12 14:09:46Z

2

If you have array, you can use array_column for that:

$people = [ ['name' => 'John', 'age' => 3], ['name' => 'Carl', 'age' => 43] ]; var_dump( array_column($people, 'name') ); /* array(2) { [0]=> string(4) "John" [1]=> string(4) "Carl" }

answered Sep 12, 2018 at 14:09

Justinas

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3 Comments

Martin Zeltin Over a year ago

That's nice but only for arrays not objects

Don't Panic Over a year ago

@MartinZeltin array_column works on arrays of objects, unless you're still using PHP 5.

keroles Monsef Over a year ago

this is exactly what i need

nito · Accepted Answer · 2021-12-19 14:34:20Z

Since PHP 7.4 you can do:

echo implode('', array_map(fn($person) => $person->name . '<br>', $people));

The inner array_map() function takes as second parameter your initial array $people.
The inner array_map() function takes as first parameter an arrow function fn() => that gets the single items $person out of your initial array $people
inside the arrow function each $person->name gets concated with '<br>' and written as value in a new array.
this new array will be returned by the array_map() function
The items of this array will be passed as second parameter to the implode() function and glued together with the empty string ''.
the entire string that implode() returns gets echoed out

Andrei · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-12 14:19:09Z

If you want to get "smart" about it you can write something like this:

 array_walk_recursive($a, function($v, $k) {echo $k === 'name' ? $v : '';});

But being smart over readability is a bad idea, always.

Samuel Reid · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-12 14:32:50Z

If I had to write a function to do that, it would be something along these lines:

function print_each($collection, $property) { foreach ($collection as $item) { echo $item->$property . "<br />"; } }

Which could be used like so:

$people = [ (object)[ "name" => "Bob", "age" => 25 ], (object)[ "name" => "Dan", "age" => 31 ], (object)[ "name" => "Sally", "age" => 45 ] ]; print_each($people, "name"); // prints "Bob<br />Dan<br />Sally<br />"

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