Greetings!

If you’re like me, you think Piklist is awesome and the add_more array results are confusing. If, for example, you have an add_more on a question & answer group, you’d get something like this:

array = (
  [0] => array(
    'questions' => array(
      [0] => 'Question #1',
      [1] => 'Question #2'
    ),
    'answers' => array(
      [0] => 'Answer #1'
      [0] => 'Answer #2'
    )
  )
)

Now it’s formatted like this because of the awesome complexity of the piklist fields, and they even provide a cool way of looping this still using Piklist.

But more than once I’ve had a situation where I really wanted to manipulate the data myself, and found the array structure cumbersome. I wanted the data in this form:

array = (
  [0] => array(
    'answer'   => 'Answer #1',
    'question' => 'Question #1'
    )
  [1] => array(
    'answer'   => 'Answer #2',
    'question' => 'Question #2'
    )
  )
)

To get this, I put together a generic function for converting the array structure, and figured I’d share it here in case someone else found it useful:

function parse_piklist_array($array) {
  if ( empty($array) )
    return array();

  $keys = array_keys($array[0]);
  if ( empty($keys) )
    return array();

  $results = $values = array();
  $count = count($array[0][$keys[0]]);
  for ($index = 0; $index < $count; $index++) {
    foreach($keys as $key_index => $key)
      $values[$key] = $array[0][$key][$index];

    $results[] = $values;
  }

  return $results;
}

As a note: This function does not work on nested add_more groups. It wouldn’t be too much work to make a recursive form of this function, but I haven’t needed that yet. If that changes, I’ll update the function here.