How to print list using hierarchical data structure?

Question

When I run this code:

foreach ($tree as $node) {
    echo str_repeat(' ', $node->tree_depth * 4) . $node->id . PHP_EOL;
}

I get well formatted text like:

Food
 Fruit
   Red
     Cherry
     Strawberry
               Cool
               Not cool
   Yellow
     Banana
 Meat
   Beef
   Pork

But I want to create a list with <ul><li>...:

I tried with:

echo '<ul>';
$prev_depth = 0;
foreach($table->fetchTree() as $row) {
    if ($row->tree_depth > $prev_depth) {
        echo '<li><ul>';
    } else if ($row->tree_depth < $prev_depth) {
        echo '</li></ul>';
    }
    echo '<li>' . $row->name . '</li>';
    $prev_depth = $row->tree_depth;
}
echo '</ul>';

But I have some extra ul tags and so on. I lost 2 days on this so if you can help me please post here...

Answer 1

Try this code instead:

<?php
echo "<ul>\n";

$tree = array(
    array('Food', 0),
    array('Fruit', 1),
    array('Red', 5),
    array('Cherry', 3),
    array('Strawberry', 3),
    array('Cool', 4),
    array('Not cool', 4),
    array('Yellow', 2),
    array('Banana', 3),
    array('Meat', 0),
    array('Beef', 4),
    array('Pork', 2),
);

$depth = 0;

foreach ($tree as $node) {
  if ($node[1] > $depth)
    echo str_repeat("<ul>\n", $node[1] - $depth);
  if ($node[1] < $depth)
    echo str_repeat("</ul>\n", $depth - $node[1]);
  $depth = $node[1];

  echo "<li>" .  $node[0] . "\n";
}
echo str_repeat("</ul>\n", $depth+1);
?>

I've updated it to output fewer <li> tags, thereby reducing the number of bullets. But on the other hand, this will generate HTML that wont validate since a jump of more than one level will result in a <ul><ul> being generated.

Answer 2

Try this algorithm:

$tree = array(
    array('Food', 0),
    array('Fruit', 1),
    array('Red', 2),
    array('Cherry', 3),
    array('Strawberry', 3),
    array('Cool', 4),
    array('Not cool', 4),
    array('Yellow', 2),
    array('Banana', 3),
    array('Meat', 0),
    array('Beef', 1),
    array('Pork', 1),
);

$depth = -1;
$flag = false;
foreach ($tree as $row) {
    while ($row[1] > $depth) {
        echo "<ul>\n", "<li>";
        $flag = false;
        $depth++;
    }
    while ($row[1] < $depth) {
        echo "</li>\n", "</ul>\n";
        $depth--;
    }
    if ($flag) {
        echo "</li>\n", "<li>";
        $flag = false;
    }
    echo $row[0];
    $flag = true;
}
while ($depth-- > -1) {
    echo "</li>\n", "</ul>\n";
}

Here you just need to replace $tree by $table->fetchTree(), $row[0] by $row->name and $row[1] by $row->tree_depth.