I am building a custom solution where I am needing to obtain all the meta values for a post into an array. I have many "keys". Is there a way to loop through them all without doing this? I have the post ID at this point in my script.

$image_meta =  get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'image', true );

// car year

$car_year = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'car_year', true );

// car mileage

$car_mileage = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'car_mileage', true );

// car price

$car_price = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'car_price', true );

// car model

$car_model = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'car_model', true );

I am building a custom solution where I am needing to obtain all the meta values for a post into an array. I have many "keys". Is there a way to loop through them all without doing this? I have the post ID at this point in my script.

$image_meta =  get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'image', true );

// car year

$car_year = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'car_year', true );

// car mileage

$car_mileage = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'car_mileage', true );

// car price

$car_price = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'car_price', true );

// car model

$car_model = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'car_model', true );

• post-meta

• 1 Not sure if I understand it, but you could do $keys = get_post_meta( $post->ID ); and $keys would contain all the available metadata for the post. E.g. $keys['image'] – Sally CJ Commented May 2, 2019 at 1:54
• 2 Well, maybe you could post more code? And by "the types", you mean post types? What do you mean by "without defining them or knowing their count"? – Sally CJ Commented May 2, 2019 at 2:39

2 Answers 2

As @Sally CJ noted in the comment to your question, you should just omit the meta key:

$meta = get_post_meta( $post->ID, '', true );

echo $meta['car_year']; // 2005

In PHP 7.1 you can use array destructing:

[
    'image_meta'  => $image_meta,
    'car_year'    => $car_year,
    'car_mileage' => $car_mileage,
    'car_price'   => $car_price,
    'car_model'   => $car_model,
] = get_post_meta( $post->ID, '', true );

echo $car_year; // 2005

I've had similiar needs in the past and as I didn't know about array destructing @phatskat mentioned I created a helper function to do the looping for me.

Helper function,

function get_keyed_meta_data_array( int $post_id, array $keys ) {
  $keyed_meta = array();
  $post_meta = get_post_meta( $post_id, '', true );

  foreach ( $keys as $key ) {
    if ( isset( $post_meta[$key] ) ) {
      $keyed_meta[$key] = $post_meta[$key];
    } else {
      $keyed_meta[$key] = '';
    }
  }

  return $keyed_meta;
}

Usage,

$keys = array(
  'image',
  'car_year',
  'car_mileage',
  'car_price',
  'car_model'
); // key array could also be returned from a config function for DRY purposes

$data = get_keyed_meta_data_array( $post->ID, $keys );
// $data['car_year'] = 2019;
// $data['car_mileage'] = 123;    
// $data['car_model'] = '';