How do I create a comma-separated list from an array in PHP?

Question

I know how to loop through items of an array using foreach and append a comma, but it's always a pain having to take off the final comma. Is there an easy PHP way of doing it?

$fruit = array('apple', 'banana', 'pear', 'grape');

Ultimately I want

$result = "apple, banana, pear, grape"

Answer 1

You want to use implode for this.

ie: $commaList = implode(', ', $fruit);

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There is a way to append commas without having a trailing one. You'd want to do this if you have to do some other manipulation at the same time. For example, maybe you want to quote each fruit and then separate them all by commas:

$prefix = $fruitList = '';
foreach ($fruits as $fruit)
{
    $fruitList .= $prefix . '"' . $fruit . '"';
    $prefix = ', ';
}

Also, if you just do it the "normal" way of appending a comma after each item (like it sounds you were doing before), and you need to trim the last one off, just do $list = rtrim($list, ', '). I see a lot of people unnecessarily mucking around with substr in this situation.