PHP For Each Loop (PHP Tutorial part 20)

Imagine that you have an associative array that you want to iterate through. PHP provides an easy way to use every element of an array with the Foreach statement.
In plain english this statement will do the following:

• For each item in the specified array execute this code.

While a For Loop and While Loop will continue until some condition fails, the For Each loop will continue until it has gone through every item in the array.

PHP For Each: Example

We have an associative array that stores the names of people in our company as the keys with the values being their age. We want to know how old everyone is at work so we use a Foreach loop to print out everyone's name and age.

PHP Code:

$employeeAges;
$employeeAges["Lisa"] = "28";
$employeeAges["Jack"] = "16";
$employeeAges["Ryan"] = "35";
$employeeAges["Rachel"] = "46";
$employeeAges["Grace"] = "34";

foreach( $employeeAges as $key => $value){
 echo "Name: $key, Age: $value <br />";
}

Display:

Name: Lisa, Age: 28
Name: Jack, Age: 16
Name: Ryan, Age: 35
Name: Rachel, Age: 46
Name: Grace, Age: 34

The syntax of the foreach statement is a little strange, so let's talk about it some.

Foreach Syntax: $something as $key => $value

This crazy statement roughly translates into: For each element of the $employeeAges associative array I want to refer to the key as $key and the value as $value.
The operator "=>" represents the relationship between a key and value. You can imagine that the key points => to the value. In our example we named the key $key and the value $value. However, it might be easier to think of it as $name and $age. Below our example does this and notice how the output is identical because we only changed the variable names that refer to the keys and values.

PHP Code:

$employeeAges;
$employeeAges["Lisa"] = "28";
$employeeAges["Jack"] = "16";
$employeeAges["Ryan"] = "35";
$employeeAges["Rachel"] = "46";
$employeeAges["Grace"] = "34";

foreach( $employeeAges as $name => $age){
 echo "Name: $name, Age: $age <br />";
}

Display:

Name: Lisa, Age: 28
Name: Jack, Age: 16
Name: Ryan, Age: 35
Name: Rachel, Age: 46
Name: Grace, Age: 34