theme cck output hidden/view

new to drupal and cck (and php), found a nice tutorial on how to theme the cck output for drupal 5. I tried applying it to my D6 site with cck 6.1 march 20 build but I cant get it to work. It is supposed to replace a certain result by a picture but just defaults to the last "else" statement as if the result wasnt found.

If i remove the ['view'] from the sample code (see below) it works fine but prints the picture 2 times even when i set my cck field to hidden trough the admin interface. What do i have to add or change to get rid of that double output?

          //Iterates through each item in the field and returns it in the variable $item
          foreach ($field_esrb_rating[0] as $item) {
            //Retrieves the correct game rating image based on what the rating is
            if ($item['view'] == 'EC') { 

<img src="http://www.esrb.org/images/ratingsymbol_ec.gif" alt="Early Childhood" />
} elseif ($item['view'] == 'E') {
<img src="http://www.esrb.org/images/ratingsymbol_e.gif" alt="Everyone" />
} else {
<img src="http://www.esrb.org/images/ratingsymbol_rp.gif" alt="Rating Pending" />
<?php }

on a side note, i guess ['view'] is some kind of variable? How could i find out what variables are available to use? I waded through the cck php-files in the modules directory but my limited experience brought up nothing. is there a list somewhere?

kind regards