Wordpress: ACF Repeater & Flexible Content fields

So basically, one of my clients wanted me to do something like having a content field (repeater: ACF | Repeater) where he can add any amount of rows and have it show up on the front-end.

Just an example of what I was supposed to do… basically my client wants to have multiple sections and I wouldn’t know how many sections he would want, its a variable number

All the while, I’ve been shamefully using pre-fixed names because what I had intended for my clients to do was just edit the content within the pre-defined fields itself. And because I was lazy. :(

After a few hours of researching about this, it seems like I’ve managed to solve my issue..?

Firstly, I used the handy-dandy Google, and I got this as one of the search results: List All Sub Fields in a Repeater or Flex Field - ACF Support. I’ve learnt that oh, a Repeater field actually consists of an array. So it means I can iterate through to display the subfields that I want!

The problem is, how do I exactly go about doing this? Using php’s var_dump($array) to ‘inspect’ the array seemed to return me this (for the repeater array):

array(1) { [0]=> array(2) { ["performance_parameters"]=> string(35) "
Performance parameters here

" ["application_area"]=> string(29) "
Application area here

" } }

Somehow, the array structure doesn’t seem to be like the one that was shown on the ACF support page :( Trying to further access the array led me to this (using $array[0]):

array(2) { ["performance_parameters"]=> string(35) "
Performance parameters here

" ["application_area"]=> string(29) "
Application area here

" }

And if I use $array[0][0], I get back NULL.

To be honest, I am still not completely sure why. I’ve tried reading up on index vs associative arrays. But if my field / key names are not pre-fixed, how would I retrieve the values?

More googling turned up these few search results: How to echo an array in PHP? - Stack Overflow & the more precise one for my use case, wordpress - how to list a repeater sub fields with label and value in Advanced Custom Field? - Stack Overflow. In the end, the main idea was to use a foreach to iterate and extract the values, in the following structure:

foreach($array as $key=>$value) {
    // do stuff
}

So this settled the first problem of getting values from a repeater field.

                    <?php

                    $fields = get_field(‘flexible_content’);


//                    $keys = array_keys($repeater);

//                    $repeater2 = array_values($repeater); // does not work, nests another layer of array


                    if($fields){

                    foreach($fields as $field_type => $field){

                            foreach($field as $row) {
                                echo($row);
                            }

                        }
                    }
                    ?>

Next, was the problem of the flexible content field. Strangely, the first field of the flexible content would be its name. I didn’t want to display its name (for now), so I was wondering how to get rid of the first element… As usual I var_dump and look inside what I’m facing:

array(1) { [0]=> array(3) { ["acf_fc_layout"]=> string(8) "row_name" ["test_1"]=> string(14) "
Test 1

" ["test_2"]=> string(428) "
Test 2

I came across this: How to get the first item from an associative PHP array? - Stack Overflow which says to use reset() to retrieve the first element of the array. So I accessed the object itself, and then used reset() as such:

 php
                    <?php

                    $flexibleContent = get_field('flexible_content_2');


                    if($flexibleContent){


                        // A bit of a hack to not display the first field, which is field name
                        $firstValue = reset($flexibleContent[0]);


                        foreach($flexibleContent as $field_type => $field){


                            foreach($field as $row) {

                                if($row === $firstValue) {
                                    // do nothing

                                } else echo $row;
                            }
                        }
                    }
                    ?>

I’m still a bit hazy on how these php arrays actually work, so if anyone can shed some light on this, it’d be great! But I’m pretty happy I learnt some useful stuff like var_dump(), reset(), and iterating through the arrays in general :)