Please help me get my head around multidimensional arrays in PHP.

I have a web page form where the user will enter their phone number(s). The page will start out with a few rows, and if the user has additional numbers they want to enter, the form will create new rows of form inputs. So, ultimately, the page does know how many numbers it's dealing with which I can assign as a variable, but I don't know how many rows of inputs I'll need to iterate through. So basically, the page woudl look like Preferred: type [ ....] number________ ext ___ Alternate type [....] number_________ ext ___ type [....] number_________ ext ___ [submit] I need to be able to check each number and insert it into a database. I'm not dead set on doing it with any particular method. I will definitely try what mbrubeck has suggested. Thanks

http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php

Not knowing about hashes in PHP is kind of like asking, "I'm using this hammer, but I put in a nail in a place where I don't want it. I'd like to remove it, but don't know how. I have seen this claw thing on the other end of the hammer, but I haven't read about that yet." In other words... get thee to http://www.php.net/manual/en/ or to a bookstore. You will find that the time you invest in reading is more than made up for by not having to go down the road of implementing everything "the hard way" and suffering along with the resulting bad code.

Well, yes, but to many people (esp. Perl programmers) 'hash' and 'associative array' are synonymous. (Actually, I don't like the fact that you can do what you describe in PHP -- I'd rather see associative arrays done as real hashes, with the extra speed that provides.) /derail

Hmn. Forgot to use LT and GT tags, but you get the idea. Sorry about the foobed code, it looked fine in preview.

littleme: In PHP, hashes are known as "Associative Arrays." PHP arrays are really convenient in that you can access them both by the key index and by the name index. example: $array['foo'] = bar; echo $array[0].' '; echo $array['foo']; ?> > will print bar bar

Just to mention: Hankins' form code won't work exactly as shown, because he's trying to interpolate variable names within a single-quoted string, which doesn't work. Not difficult to fix, though.

I have no idea what hashes are Ever so slightly off-topic, but you *must* learn about hashes! They are immensely useful for all sorts of real-world programming situations. And they're really not difficult if you understand arrays. Basically, a hash is just a different type of array where, instead of the indexes being numbers (the 0th element, the 1st element, the 99th element etc), they are strings. So you can say "Give me the value in the 'type' element", "Give me the value in the 'number' element" and so on. If nothing else, it saves you having to remember that element 0 is the type, element 1 is the name, element 2 is the number etc.

mbrubeck - solution worked. ajbattrick and Hankins - I didn't realize you could string those[] index names together like that. So Hankins - it seems like your solution saves me the step of reading the various $_POST variables and then putting them into the array or class or whatever. For that reason, I'm assuming your method would be the preferable way to do it in this case I'll test it and make sure, but just so I understand better, when would I want to use a class instead? And Jon_Kill - no doubt, I still have much to learn. if you have any books or web pages you'd like to direct me towards, that would be helpful. Thanks