Looping through a DateTime object array

Question

I have been struggling with traversing php's objects. I have the following DateTime object in an array, but am having trouble iterating through it. What am I doing wrong?

// print_r($calendar_days);
Array
(
    [0] => DateTime Object
        (
            [date] => 2016-04-06 00:00:00
            [timezone_type] => 3
            [timezone] => Europe/Helsinki
        )

    [1] => DateTime Object
        (
            [date] => 2016-04-13 00:00:00
            [timezone_type] => 3
            [timezone] => Europe/Helsinki
        )

    [2] => DateTime Object
        (
            [date] => 2016-04-20 00:00:00
            [timezone_type] => 3
            [timezone] => Europe/Helsinki
        )

    [3] => DateTime Object
        (
            [date] => 2016-04-27 00:00:00
            [timezone_type] => 3
            [timezone] => Europe/Helsinki
        )

)

PHP

<?php foreach ($calendar_days as $key => $value){ ?>
  <a href="#">
    <div class="day-container">
      <strong> <?php echo $key->date; ?></strong>
    </div>
  </a>
<?php }

Thanks.

I tried that, but got Message: Undefined property: DateTime::$date — user3442612
– user3442612, Commented Apr 4, 2016 at 9:47

Mikey · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-04 10:35:18Z

1

You can find an example ideone here.

Essentially your current code is trying to access the member variable date on the $key of the array, so it is trying to do something like;

echo 0->date;

PHP doesn't understand exactly what you mean, so you won't be getting the output you expect. What you want to do is access the value (the actual DateTime object) and use that to output the dates instead, like so;

echo $value->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

You need to remember you're handling DateTime objects, so just trying to access ->date won't work as you expect. To my knowledge the DateTime object does not allow you to directly access its properties and instead if you want to print out the date you have to use it's public functions instead ->format()

You can find the full docs for DateTime here

Edit: As mentioned @barat, you will no longer need $key => $value now that you are not trying to access the $key so you can omit $key:

foreach ($calendar_days as $value) { ... }

edited Apr 4, 2016 at 10:35

answered Apr 4, 2016 at 10:00

Mikey

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4 Comments

barat Over a year ago

BTW ... if You're iterating through Array and don't need keys just do it like: foreach($calendar_days as $date) {echo $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');}

Mikey Over a year ago

Aye you don't, but since he had it originally I thought I'd just leave it in to leave the code closer to the original, and just in case he had some other reason for using the $key

barat Over a year ago

My comment was more to user3442612 - I'm sure that for You it's common knowlage :)

user3442612 Over a year ago

Ohhhhh, the value is an object. I feel kind of dumb now. Thanks for the clear explanation.

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