I am paging through the elements of an array. I get the total number of elements in the array with:
$total = count($myarray);
My paging function loads the current element on the page and provides "Previous" and "Next" links that have urls like:
http://myapp.com?page=34
If you click the link I grab that and load it onto the page by getting (I sanitize the $_GET, this is just for example):
$element = $myarray[$_GET['page']];
This should grab the element of the array with a key == $_GET['page'] and it does. However, the problem is that my total count of elements doesn't match some keys because while there are 100 elements in the array, certain numbers are missing so the 100th item actually has a key of 102.
How should I be doing this? Do I need to rewrite the keys to match the available number of elements? Some other method? Thanks for your input.
If you have gaps in the indices, you should reindex the array. You can do that before you generate the links, or probably easier on the receiving page:
$myarray = array_values($myarray);
$element = $myarray[$_GET['page']];
This would give you the 100th element, even if it previously had the key 102. (You could use a temporary array of course, if you need to retain the original indexing.)
How should I be doing this? Do I need to rewrite the keys to match the available number of elements? Some other method?
No you don't need to worry about them not matching. Php arrays are associative containers, like dictionaries in other languages. If you define something at 98 and 100, 99 isn't sitting there in memory, the data structure behind the associative container only stores whats there. You're not wasting space by not "filling it up" up to count.
So the practice you describe is fine. If there is no page "99" nothing need show up in your array. It may be nice, however, to see that your array doesn't have anything for the 'page' parameter and display an error message.
But then why, when I access $total = count($myarray); $myarray[$total] where $total = 100 I do not get the last element? I can put page=101 and get one more record. I should not be able to do this
Because count is counting how many things are in the array. If you have an array with only the even elements filled in, ie:
$myArray[0] = "This";
$myArray[2] = "is";
$myArray[4] = "even";
Here count($myArray) is 3. There's nothing in [1] or [3]. Maybe this is easier to see when you take numbers out of the equation. Arrays can have string indexes
$myArray = array();
$myArray["Hello"] = "A Bunch of";
$myArray["World"] = "words";
Here count($myArray) is 2.
In the first case, it wouldn't make sense to access $myArray[3] because nothing is there. Clearly in the second example, there's nothing at 2.
you can use
$array = array_values($array);