PHP, Arrays & A Lot Of Confusion

Posted on 16th Feb 2014 by admin

I've been doing basic PHP work on sites for a few years now, but I've never been tempted to learn how the ARRAY function worked, nor in what instances to use it. Now I've stumbled upon the jCarousel script, and I need to know how to use the ARRAY function to populate the jquery plugin.

I have the dynamically driven AJAX version of the plugin downloaded and the example images work fine in the php file which is accessed by the AJAX. The only problem is I have no idea how to integrate the PHP coding I was using into the new PHP file which calls for the images to be placed (apparently manually?) into an array, like so:

Code: <?php

// Array indexes are 0-based, jCarousel positions are 1-based.
$first = max(0, intval($_GET['first']) - 1);
$last = max($first + 1, intval($_GET['last']) - 1);

$length = $last - $first + 1;

// ---

$images = array(
'http://static.flickr.com/66/199481236_dc98b5abb3_s.jpg',
'http://static.flickr.com/75/199481072_b4a0d09597_s.jpg',
'http://static.flickr.com/57/199481087_33ae73a8de_s.jpg',
'http://static.flickr.com/77/199481108_4359e6b971_s.jpg',
'http://static.flickr.com/58/199481143_3c148d9dd3_s.jpg',
'http://static.flickr.com/72/199481203_ad4cdcf109_s.jpg',
'http://static.flickr.com/58/199481218_264ce20da0_s.jpg',
'http://static.flickr.com/69/199481255_fdfe885f87_s.jpg',
'http://static.flickr.com/60/199480111_87d4cb3e38_s.jpg',
'http://static.flickr.com/70/229228324_08223b70fa_s.jpg',
);

$total = count($images);
$selected = array_slice($images, $first, $length);

// ---

header('Content-Type: text/xml');

echo '<data>';

// Return total number of images so the callback
// can set the size of the carousel.
echo ' <total>' . $total . '</total>';

foreach ($selected as $img) {
echo ' <image>' . $img . '</image>';
}

echo '</data>';

?>
Here's the PHP code I was using to display the images:

Code: <?php

mysql_connect(localhost,user,pw);
@mysql_select_db(db) or die( "Unable to select database");

$query = "SELECT * FROM related LEFT JOIN film ON related.title = film.title
WHERE related.name = '$name' ";
$result = mysql_query( $query ) or die(mysql_error());

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
extract($row);

echo '<li><a href="filmography.php?title='.$title.'"><img src="images/thumbnails/'.$image.'.jpg" alt="" title="'.$title.' ('.$year.')"></a></li>';

}
?>
Is anyone able to explain to me how I'm supposed to integrate the above PHP script into the array? Am I going about this all wrong and need to dramatically change the first snippet of code in order to access the database and retrieve the data in the format I want?

I sincerely apologize if I sound desperate, but after hours of looking at examples of arrays I still have no idea how I am supposed to use the code from the jCarousel in conjunction with my typical PHP style.

Any help would be most appreciated.