How to get the current key name while building an array

I am building a PHP menu and I want to have an array used to define the menu items. The array would be something like this:

$menuItems = [
    "menu_title" => [
        "view_type" => [
            "name" => "display_name",
            "url"  => "?p=view_type&t=menu_title",
        ],
    ],
];

where "menu_title" and "view_type" would act as keys for the main array and secondary array, but would also act as URL paramenters values. For example:

$menuItems = [
    "user_accounts" => [
        "list" => [
            "name" => "User list",
            "url"  => "?p=list&t=user_accounts",
        ],
        "edit" => [
            "name" => "Edit user",
            "url"  => "?p=edit&t=user_accounts",
        ],
    ],
    "user_profile" => [
        "list" => [
            "name" => "Profile list",
            "url"  => "?p=list&t=user_profile",
        ],
    ],
];

Is there a way in which I could refrence within the array value it's own key name? Something along the lines of

$menuItems = [
    "menu_title" => [
        "view_type" => [
            "name" => "display_name",
            "url"  => "?p=<<name of key holding the key holding this value>>&t=<<name of key holding the key holding the key holding this value>>",
        ],
    ],
];

For further context, after defining the array, I use it to define the menu itself with a function:

$this->addMenu("Users", [
    $menuItems["user_accounts"]["list"]["name"] => $menuItems["user_accounts"]["list"]["url"],
]);

I know I can use key(), or array_search(), or array_keys() and so on, but everything I've found so far requires me to iterate through the array after its being declared - what I want to achieve is refrencing the key name while the array is built, so that I don't have to needlesly loop through the array just to do this.

Or I could just go around and define the piece that needs url values while defining the menu itself, or just type the values myself if I'm typing the keynames anyways:

$this->addMenu("Users", [
    $menuItems["user_accounts"]["list"]["name"] => "?p=list&t=user_accounts",
]);

But I'm looking for a way to avoid doing that because people other than myself will be using this to define new menu items or edit them and whenever there's an user-input involved, there's bound to be typing errors, or they miss changing the url values and so on. My endgoal would be:

If the user wants to rename a menu item or change the url, they only have to do it in the "main" array, and the change will automatically propagate to the menu generating function
If the user defines a new menu item, I only need them to define it's name, view and display name, without them having to pay attention to the url itself

My logic/intuition tells me that's not really possible, as if the array has no been built yet, it's not stored/defined anywhere and the key names are not "mapped" - is there a way I am wrong and this is actually achievable?

Solution

You cannot reference the keys of the array when you're declaring the array, but you can do this when you are using the array. Like this:

<?php

$menuItems = [
    "menu_title" => [
        "view_type" => [
            "name" => "display_name",
            "url"  => "hello.html",
        ],
    ],
];

foreach ($menuItems as $menuItemKey => $menuItem) {
    foreach ($menuItem as $menuLinkKey => $menuLink) {
        $name = $menuLink['name'];
        $url  = $menuLink['url'] . "?p=$menuLinkKey&t=$menuItemKey";
        echo '<a href="' . $url . '">' . $name . '</a>';
    }    
}

The output is:

<a href="hello.html?p=view_type&t=menu_title">display_name</a>

Live demo: https://3v4l.org/WQXsY

See the foreach control structure