My inc.functions.php – Part 4 : Unshifting elements on an array and preserving keys

Imagine you have an array of zipcodes as keys and names of cities as values:

$zipcodes = array(
	'9800' => 'Deinze',
	'8460' => 'Ettelgem',
	'9000' => 'Gent',
	'8400' => 'Oostende'
);

Now, if I were to place those into a dropdown, I’d run that array to a function like so:

function createDropdown($ddName, $arValues) {
	$toReturn = "<select name=\"$ddName\" id=\"$ddName\">\n";

	foreach ($arValues as $key => $value) {
		$toReturn .= "\t<option value=\"$key\">$value</option>\n";
	}

	$toReturn .= "</select>";

	return $toReturn;
}

Running the array above through that function would result in the following HTML:

<!-- output of echo createDropdown("test", $zipcodes); -->
<select name="test" id="test">
	<option value="9800">Deinze</option>
	<option value="8460">Ettelgem</option>
	<option value="9000">Gent</option>
	<option value="8400">Oostende</option>
</select>

Quite obvious, not?

Now, I don’t want to have “Deinze” show up in the dropdown as the first item, but I want to show “Please choose your city” as the first item (with a value of 0). A quick peek at the PHP docs tell me that I need to use array_unshift to “prepend one or more elements to the beginning of an array”

array_unshift($zipcodes, "Please Choose a City");

Running the code above would float my boat, right? Wrong! The note at the phpdocs that “All numerical array keys will be modified to start counting from zero while literal keys won’t be touched”. After having run array_unshift on $zipcodes it indeed looks like this:

Array
(
    [0] => Please Choose a City
    [1] => Deinze
    [2] => Ettelgem
    [3] => Gent
    [4] => Oostende
)

The solution is to create a second array with only one item (index: “0”, value: “Please choose a city” and then merge them together, but not using the array_merge function as the function looses numerical keys too!

So what does one need to use then? Well, it might sound noobcake-ish to you but this one I didn’t know: one can actually join 2 arrays in PHP by using the mathematical + operator! Now this is something I did not expect (it looks so not-PHP-alike, not?)!

$zipcodes = array("0" => "Please Choose a City") + $zipcodes;

And yes, the array now looks like:

Array
(
    [0] => Please Choose a City
    [9800] => Deinze
    [8460] => Ettelgem
    [9000] => Gent
    [8400] => Oostende
)

And the HTML output after running the array through the createDropdown function looks like:

<select name="test" id="test">
	<option value="0">Please Choose a City</option>
	<option value="9800">Deinze</option>
	<option value="8460">Ettelgem</option>
	<option value="9000">Gent</option>
	<option value="8400">Oostende</option>
</select>

To finalize, one could wrap this little trick into a function and presto, but since it would take more code to join 2 arrays through a custom built function (which only uses a + operator) it’s way more easy to “just” remember this little trick 😉