1 character only foreach loop result in PHP

foreach, php

Solution

From the code, I would say that `$data2` represents the data of 1 line from the DB.

So, it should be `$data2` that contains what you want to display.

Your foreach loop is useless : if you want to display the data from 1 line, you can just use `$data2` directly.

If you want to go line by line, you must not iterate over $data2, but loop while mysql_fetch_array returns data.

Something like this, I'd say :

$result2 = mysql_query("SELECT id,fp_thumb,title FROM media") or die(mysql_error());
while ($data2 = mysql_fetch_array($result2)) {
    echo '<li><a href="media.php?id='.$data2['id'].'"><img src="'.$data2['fp_thumb'].'" alt="'.$data2['title'].'" /></a></li>';
}

Also, you might want to escape the data your are outputing, to make sure you don't have any kind of HTML/javascript injection -- at least in the src and title, I'd say ; for that, you can use `htmlspecialchars`

Your echo would, then, probably look like this :

echo '<li><a href="media.php?id='
    . $data2['id']
    . '"><img src="'
    . htmlspecialchars($data2['fp_thumb'])
    . '" alt="'
    . htmlspecialchars($data2['title'])
    . '" /></a></li>';

(I considered id is an integer, auto-incremented or something like that, so not much of a risk)

Edit after seeing the comment on another answer

With what you first used :

$data2 is an associative array, that looks like this :

array
  'id' => int 152
  'title' => string 'this is the title' (length=17)
  'fp_thumb' => string 'http://...../' (length=13)

Which means the foreach will loop three times, and $val will be :

int 152
string 'this is the title' (length=17)
string 'http://...../' (length=13)

(One value for each iteration)

ie, $val is not an array is a scalar value.

When you do that :

$a = 152;
var_dump($a['id']);

you get

null

When doing

$a = 'this is the title';
var_dump($a['id']);

you get :

string 't' (length=1)

ie, you only get the first character when using array-access on a string, with a key that is a string.

Note that array-access on a string, with a numeric key, is used to access one character of the array :

$a = 'this is the title';
var_dump($a[3]);

gets you :

string 's' (length=1)

For more informations, see the manual page about string, especially String access and modification by character, which states :

Characters within strings may be accessed and modified by specifying the zero-based offset of the desired character after the string using square array brackets, as in $str[42]. Think of a string as an array of characters for this purpose.

And :

Non-integer types are converted to integer.

And converting 'title' to an integer gives 0 ; so, you get the first character of the string.

Hope this helps, and you understood "why" ;-)

Problem

Original source