kirk bushell | Riding the wave of programmatic novelty

array_collect, mapping required fields to a PHP array

December 09, 2008 at 10:30 AM · Posted under Blog · Tagged with array, function, php

After delving around in ruby for a little and finding the magic that is the Array.collect method, I decided to write one for PHP, considering how much I use it in Ruby. Hopefully others will find some use in this function.

<?php
function array_collect($array, $params)
{
	$return = array();
	if (!is_array($params)) {
		$params = array($params);
	}
	
	foreach ($array as $record) {
		$rec_ret = array();
		foreach ($params as $search_term) {
			if (array_key_exists($search_term, $record)) {
				$rec_ret[$search_term] = $record[$search_term];
			}
		}
		
		if (count($rec_ret) > 0) {
			$return[] = $rec_ret;
		}
	}
	
	return $return;
}
?>

Basically, what this allows us to do is extract information from an array and have it stored in another array. For example, we may only want a few select fields as a subset of data, we could do this by doing:

$records = array(array('a' => 'y', 'b' => 'z', 'c' => 'e'), array('a' => 'x', 'b' => 'w', 'c' => 'f'));
$subset1 = array_collect($records, 'a'); // $subset1 will be: array(array('a' => 'y'), array('a' => 'x'));
$subset2 = array_collect($records, array('a', 'c')); // $subset2 will be: array(array('a' => 'y', 'c' => 'e'), array('a' => 'x', 'c' => 'f'));

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