The question: How do I generate navigation, allowing for applying different classes to different sub-items, from a multi-dimensional array? Here is how I was doing it before I had any need for multi-level navigation: Home Pics About and was generated by calling nav(): function nav(){ $links = array( "Home" => "home.php", "Pics" => "pics.php", "About" => "about.php" ); $base = basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']); foreach($nav as $k => $v){ echo buildLinks($k, $v, $base); } } Here is buildLinks(): function buildLinks($name, $page, $selected){ if($selected == $page){ $theLink = "<li class=\"selected\"><a href=\"$page\">$name</a></li>\n"; } else { $thelink = "<li><a href=\"$page\">$name</a></li>\n"; } return $thelink; } My question, again: how would I achieve the following nav (and notice that the visible sub navigation elements are only present when on that specific page): Home something1 something2 Pics About and... Home Pics people places About What I've tried From looking at it it would seem that some iterator in the SPL would be a good fit for this but I'm not sure how to approach this. I have played around with RecursiveIteratorIterator but I'm not sure how to apply a different style to only the sub menu items and also how to only show these items if you are on the correct page. I built this array to test with but don't know how to work with the submenu1 items individually: $nav = array( array( "Home" => "home.php", "submenu1" => array( "something1"=>"something1.php", "something2" => "something2.php") ), array("Pics" => "pics.php"), array("About" => "about.php") ); The following will print out the lot in order but how do I apply, say a class name to the submenu1 items or only show them when the person is on, say, the "Home" page? $iterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(new RecursiveArrayIterator($nav)); foreach($iterator as $key=>$value) { echo $key.' -- '.$value.'<br />'; }