PHP literally outputting the word 'Array' instead of the values in said array

Question

Before you immediately close the question, please read first. I know about var_dump(), print_r(), echo etc. It just doesn't seem to work in my particular use-case, or I'm unsure how exactly to implement them in my exact situation.

After updating to the integrated PDO data abstraction layer, its giving us our data back formatted a bit differently.

One of our forms would output a list of arrays converted to strings. Below is a snippet:

$this->output .= "<option id='".$option_name."' value='".$values[$i]."'".$selected.">".$options[$i]."</option>\n";

Each $options[$i] is an array that contained material id and description. So it would look something like this when output properly:

• Red Material 1234
• Blue Material 2235
• Green Material 3236
• ....etc...

What the array looks like for each would be: Array ([description] => Red Material [materialid] => 1234)

Now it just outputs:

• Array
• Array
• Array...

How can I just convert $options[$i] to a string before feeding it to this output field?

Some assistance would be appreciated. I feel like I'm getting caught up on something that should be trivial.

Answer 1

$options[$i] is an array, and when you convert an array to a string you get the string Array.

You want to get the elements of the array:

$this->output .= "<option id='{$option_name}' value='{$values[$i]}' $selected>{$options[$i]['description']} {$options[$i]['materialid']}</option>\n";

Using string substitution instead of concatenation makes the code easier to read, and often avoids quoting problems.