Claudio Cicali – Web Developer and Solution Architect

Today I run across this strange PHP behaviour. Say, you need to build an associative array from an array. For a task like that, I wrote this:

    $idx=0;
    foreach($planets as $planet)
       $results[$idx++] = $planet;

Guess what? It won’t work. $result is built as a normal array, not associative. And it could be reasonable, after all… but:

    $idx=0;
    foreach($planets as $planet)
      {
        $idx++;
        $results[$idx] = $planet;
      }

Note the increment of $idx wrapped out from the square brackets. Well, after the loop, $result is a shiny new associative array. Ah!