How to Limit Foreach Loop to a Number of Loops in PHP

Most of the time when we create a foreach loop, we'll want to proceed all elements of object/array being evaluated. Now, how if we want to limit a foreach loop to a number of loops? I will share how we could achive that.

To limit foreach loop, we'll need help from this PHP function: array_slice. From the description in PHP Manual, this function array_slice() returns the sequence of elements from the array array as specified by the offset and length parameters.

Let's say we have an array $boxes which contains five elements. We want to process only three of them.

// We have boxes of fruits
$boxes = array(
    array('label' => 'apples'),
    array('label' => 'oranges'),
    array('label' => 'bananas'),
    array('label' => 'grapes'),
    array('label' => 'watermelons'),    
);

// Show only the first three boxes
foreach(array_slice($boxes, 0, 3) as $box)
{
    // Print box labels
    echo $box['label'];
    echo "<br>";    
}

Above code will output:

apples
oranges
bananas

Final Words

I hope that you now know how to limit foreach loop to a number of loops in PHP. If you run into any issues or have any feedback feel free to drop a comment below.