Populate PHP Array with multiple Rows

Question

I am running a SQL Query in php and returning the results like this

Name
Joe
Jack
Jerri
Jerry

I need to parse this into a php array and unfortunately, the method I have used in the past to add to a php array is no longer relevant since I am returning multiple rows. How would I alter this syntax in order to account for one column with multiple rows to populate my php array?

$rows = $db->loadRowList();
$output = array();
foreach ($rows as $row) { array_push($output, $row); }
$data = json_encode($output[0]);

Answer 1

TL;DR: Use loadAssocList('id', 'name')

---

loadRowList() returns an indexed array of indexed arrays from the table records returned by the query

Thus, I'll assume the $rows array looks something like this:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => Joe
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => Jack
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [0] => Jerri
        )

    [3] => Array
        (
            [0] => Jerry
        )
)

You can use PHP's array_column() to fetch a single index value from every child array:

$rows = $db->loadRowList();
$output = array_column($rows, 0);

$output should now contain an array looking like:

Array
(
    [0] => Joe
    [1] => Jack
    [2] => Jerri
    [3] => Jerry
)

An improvement we can make here is to maintain an associative array, that maps your database's column names to their values. loadAssocList() can help there.

$rows = $db->loadAssocList();
$output = array_column($rows, 'name');

Note that we now use the "name" index instead of 0.

This can be even further improved by utilizing the parameters of loadAssocList():

loadAssocList($key, $column) returns an associative array, indexed on 'key', of values from the column named 'column' returned by the query

Using this method, we can receive a single array in ID => Name key value format:

$ouput = $db->loadAssocList('id', 'name');