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PHP PHP Arrays and Control Structures PHP Arrays Multidimensional Arrays

Christopher Morriss
Christopher Morriss
13,447 Points

PHP Parse Error / You cannot output an associative array directly within a string - How do I fix this?

I am stuck on Challenge Task 3 of 3 (Replace the hard coded values in the output with the name and email values from the contacts array) of the Multidimensional Arrays coding task and I am not sure what I have done wrong.

When I put single quotes around the string 'name', I receive the 'You cannot output an associative array directly within a string' error and when I put double quotes around 'name', I receive a PHP Parse Error stating that ',' or ';' was expected instead of name.

What am I doing wrong here? Have I missed out an important piece of code?

index.php
<?php
//edit this array
$contacts = array( array('name' => 'Alena Holligan',
                         'email' => 'alena.holligan@teamtreehouse.com'), 
                   array('name' => 'Dave McFarland',
                         'email' => 'dave.mcfarland@teamtreehouse.com'), 
                   array('name' => 'Treasure Porth',
                         'email' => 'treasure.porth@teamtreehouse.com'),
                   array('name' => 'Andrew Chalkley',
                         'email' => 'andrew.chalkley@teamtreehouse.com'));

echo "<ul>\n";
//$contacts[0] will return 'Alena Holligan' in our simple array of names.
echo "<li>$contacts[0]['name'] : $contacts[0]['email']</li>\n";
echo "<li>$contacts[1]['name'] : $contacts[1]['email']</li>\n";
echo "<li>$contacts[2]['name'] : $contacts[2]['email']</li>\n";
echo "<li>$contacts[3]['name'] : $contacts[3]['email']</li>\n";
echo "</ul>\n";

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,268 Points

The "string" the error is talking about is the entire echo message content. You need to incorporate the new data in a different way. For example:

<?php
// instead of this:
echo "<li>$contacts[0]['name'] : $contacts[0]['email']</li>\n";
// you could create template string substitution tokens using braces:
echo "<li>{$contacts[0]['name']} : {$contacts[0]['email']}</li>\n";
// or you could build the string using concatenation:
echo "<li>" . $contacts[0]['name'] . " : " . $contacts[0]['email'] . "</li>\n";