how to refer to fields with multiple values in node--content-type template

Question

I currently have a template for the article content type.

node--article.tpl.php contains:

<?php
    print render($content['body']);
    print render($content['field_file']);
    print render($content['field_tags']);
?>

All of those fields are rendered just fine. All the values of field_tags are rendered. However I'd like to be able to refer to each individual value of the tags field.

For instance, I'd like to be able to do

    <span class="customClass i">field_tag</span>

and iterate i for each item the field spits out.

I've made some attempts with no luck. I tried

$i = 0;
while($content['field_tags']){
    print "<span class='customClass ".$i."'>";
    print render($content['field_tags']);
    print "</span>";
    $i += 1;
}

However that just created an infinite loop. I attempted it with

while(render($content['field_tags']))

as well but that created an infinite loop as well. Is there a way to access the tags field as an array? rather than just one element in the $content array?

Answer 1

I managed to accomplish this by appending [value] to the end of the field_tag array. Then by using the 'count' function I created a for loop to iterate through each value like so

$j = count($content['field_tags']);
for( $i = 0; $i < $j; $j+= 1){
    if(render($content['field_tags'][$i]) != ''){
        print "<span class='customClass ".$i."'>";
        print render($content['field_tags'][$i]);
        print "</span>";
    }
}

Note: For some reason I had to insert a check for if the tag was empty because the array ended up being a lot larger than the number of the tags.