Php/mysql - Incrementing Variable Name To Loop For Data

I have rows in my teams table named player1, player2, player3 ... player12. In PHP script i set them as variables ($player1,$player2...) and want to loop through them to check if t

Solution 1:

You can do this with complex expressions (curly brackets {}) around a variable name.

if(empty(${"player$i"})) {
    //player$i is empty
}

complex expressions allow you to set variable names dynamically.

To help you better understand how these work, I will show you that you can also use these just like regular string concatenation like so

$variable = "many test";
echo"this is a test echo. {$variable}";

I commonly use this for generating a variable for many array variables based on their key

$array = array("key1" => "value1", "key2" => "value2");
foreach($arrayas$key => $value) {
    ${$key} = $value;
}

The code above would create 2 variables, $key1 and $key2, with the appropriate value associated with them.

Alternatively, I'm pretty sure you can just add another $ to the front of your variable, but I would say this is harder to read and figure out what's going on.

$playercheck = "player"+$i;  
if($$playercheck != 0) {
    $playerspicked++;
}

Solution 2:

In your case there is a much easier way to count all the not null players in the team.

echo count(array_filter($yourTeam));

the array_filter function without a second parameter will automatically remove the null entries.