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How to echo or print an array in PHP?

Tags:

arrays

php

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What is echo and print in PHP?

echo and print are more or less the same. They are both used to output data to the screen. The differences are small: echo has no return value while print has a return value of 1 so it can be used in expressions.


To see the contents of array you can use.

1) print_r($array); or if you want nicely formatted array then:

echo '<pre>'; print_r($array); echo '</pre>';

2) use var_dump($array) to get more information of the content in the array like datatype and length.

3) you can loop the array using php's foreach(); and get the desired output. more info on foreach in php's documentation website:
http://in3.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.foreach.php


This will do

foreach($results['data'] as $result) {
    echo $result['type'], '<br>';
}

If you just want to know the content without a format (e.g. for debuging purpose) I use this:

echo json_encode($anArray);

This will show it as a JSON which is pretty human readable.


There are multiple function to printing array content that each has features.

print_r()

Prints human-readable information about a variable.

$arr = ["a", "b", "c"];
echo "<pre>";
print_r($arr);
echo "</pre>";
Array
(
    [0] => a
    [1] => b
    [2] => c
)


var_dump()

Displays structured information about expressions that includes its type and value.

echo "<pre>";
var_dump($arr);
echo "</pre>";
array(3) {
  [0]=>
  string(1) "a"
  [1]=>
  string(1) "b"
  [2]=>
  string(1) "c"
}


var_export()

Displays structured information about the given variable that returned representation is valid PHP code.

echo "<pre>";
var_export($arr);
echo "</pre>";
array (
  0 => 'a',
  1 => 'b',
  2 => 'c',
)

Note that because browser condense multiple whitespace characters (including newlines) to a single space (answer) you need to wrap above functions in <pre></pre> to display result in correct format.


Also there is another way to printing array content with certain conditions.

echo

Output one or more strings. So if you want to print array content using echo, you need to loop through array and in loop use echo to printing array items.

foreach ($arr as $key=>$item){
    echo "$key => $item <br>";
}
0 => a 
1 => b 
2 => c 

You can use print_r, var_dump and var_export funcations of php:

print_r: Convert into human readble form

<?php
echo "<pre>";
 print_r($results); 
echo "</pre>";
?>

var_dump(): will show you the type of the thing as well as what's in it.

var_dump($results);

foreach loop: using for each loop you can iterate each and every value of an array.

foreach($results['data'] as $result) {
    echo $result['type'].'<br>';
}

Did you try using print_r to print it in human-readable form?


foreach($results['data'] as $result) {
    echo $result['type'], '<br />';
}

or echo $results['data'][1]['type'];