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PHP Build a Basic PHP Website (2018) Listing and Sorting Inventory Items Associative Arrays

Andrew Hunt
Andrew Hunt
7,665 Points
Posted by Andrew Hunt
Andrew Hunt
7,665 Points

Adding element to array - why won't this work?

I'm confused - I'm trying to complete this challenge by adding the key "title" to an array of $movies. I've tried to follow the example as per the media library site but can't pass this. I've seen other solutions elsewhere using the array(); formatting so may have to use that in order to pass. I don't understand why this solution won't work as well though?

index.php 
<?php 
$movie = [];

$movie[] = [
  "title" => "The Empire Strikes Back",
];
?>
<h1>Back to the Future (1985)</h1>

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>Director</th>
    <td>Robert Zemeckis</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th>IMDB Rating</th>
    <td>8.5</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th>IMDB Ranking</th>
    <td>53</td>
  </tr>
</table>

2 Answers

andren
andren
28,558 Points
andren
andren
28,558 Points

Often times these challenges will be looking for specific code, which means that even if the result is right the code might still be marked as wrong. It's important to note thought that this is not the case here. Your code does actually do something different from what the task is asking.

When you use [] after an array name when assigning a value, you are telling PHP to add the thing you specify to the array. Since the thing you specify is not a single value, but an array itself, you are actually telling PHP to add the entire array as an item inside of your array. Which means that after running your code the movie array will look like this:

array(1) {
  [0]=>
  array(1) {
    ["title"]=>
    string(23) "The Empire Strikes Back"
  }
}

In other words your array has an array nested within itself as the first item. Which is clearly not quite what the challenge is asking for.

If you remove the brackets like this:

$movie = [
  "title" => "The Empire Strikes Back",
];

Then it will work correctly as you are now simply setting the variable to an array, instead of telling PHP to add the value as an array item.

Andrew Hunt
Andrew Hunt
7,665 Points
Andrew Hunt
Andrew Hunt
7,665 Points

Aha, thanks andren, I can see where I was going wrong now - that's very helpful!