PHP: Stacking an array over multiple columns in a table

Question

I have an interesting problem, seems like it would have been solved long ago but can't find anything.

I have a simple array, variable length.

I need to put the array in a table BUT only X columns wide. Meaning, if the array has 25 values, and I only want 3 columns, there will be 2 columns of 11 and 1 column of 3 (the remainder).

Like this (each number represents a value in a table cell):

1    12    23
2    13    24
3    14    25
4    15
5    16
6    17
7    18
8    19
9    20
10   21
11   22

I've spent all day afternoon this, seems like it would be simple, but either my game is off today or it's harder than I think.

Of course, no problem going horizontally, easy, but vertically is the requirement and I never know the size of the array and number of columns can vary.

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

In the case you want the last column to have as many elements as posible to fit the other columns (the most dynamic case for this problem), this would be a solution:

<?php

$numberOfColumns = 3;
$myArray = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25];

$arrayLength = count($myArray); // 25
$columnLength = ceil($arrayLength / $numberOfColumns); // 9

for ($i = 0; $i < $columnLength; $i++) {

  for ($j = 0; $j < $numberOfColumns; $j++) {

    $arrayIndex = $j * $columnLength + $i;
    if ($arrayIndex < $arrayLength) {
      echo $myArray[$arrayIndex] . " ";
    }

  }

  echo '<br>';
}

This is the output in my browser: