Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

PHP PHP Arrays and Control Structures PHP Arrays Multidimensional Arrays

Posted by Christopher Morriss
Christopher Morriss
13,450 Points

PHP Parse Error / You cannot output an associative array directly within a string - How do I fix this?

I am stuck on Challenge Task 3 of 3 (Replace the hard coded values in the output with the name and email values from the contacts array) of the Multidimensional Arrays coding task and I am not sure what I have done wrong.

When I put single quotes around the string 'name', I receive the 'You cannot output an associative array directly within a string' error and when I put double quotes around 'name', I receive a PHP Parse Error stating that ',' or ';' was expected instead of name.

What am I doing wrong here? Have I missed out an important piece of code?

index.php 
<?php
//edit this array
$contacts = array( array('name' => 'Alena Holligan',
                         'email' => 'alena.holligan@teamtreehouse.com'), 
                   array('name' => 'Dave McFarland',
                         'email' => 'dave.mcfarland@teamtreehouse.com'), 
                   array('name' => 'Treasure Porth',
                         'email' => 'treasure.porth@teamtreehouse.com'),
                   array('name' => 'Andrew Chalkley',
                         'email' => 'andrew.chalkley@teamtreehouse.com'));

echo "<ul>\n";
//$contacts[0] will return 'Alena Holligan' in our simple array of names.
echo "<li>$contacts[0]['name'] : $contacts[0]['email']</li>\n";
echo "<li>$contacts[1]['name'] : $contacts[1]['email']</li>\n";
echo "<li>$contacts[2]['name'] : $contacts[2]['email']</li>\n";
echo "<li>$contacts[3]['name'] : $contacts[3]['email']</li>\n";
echo "</ul>\n";

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,275 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,275 Points

The "string" the error is talking about is the entire echo message content. You need to incorporate the new data in a different way. For example:

<?php
// instead of this:
echo "<li>$contacts[0]['name'] : $contacts[0]['email']</li>\n";
// you could create template string substitution tokens using braces:
echo "<li>{$contacts[0]['name']} : {$contacts[0]['email']}</li>\n";
// or you could build the string using concatenation:
echo "<li>" . $contacts[0]['name'] . " : " . $contacts[0]['email'] . "</li>\n";
Christopher Morriss
Christopher Morriss
13,450 Points

That makes sense, thank you!