Remove all non-string elements from array in PHP

Question

I have an array in PHP, which may contain elements of various types. How can I keep only the elements that are strings, and remove all the others?

I know I can do

foreach ($array as $key => $val)
  if (gettype($val) !== 'string')
    unset($array[$key]);

But I would like an easier way to do it.
Note: I don't care about the array's keys and whether they stay the same or not.

anestv · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-14 13:01:39Z

4

You can do it in one line using PHP's functions array_filter() and is_string().

$new = array_filter($array, "is_string");

array_filter() keeps only the elemets of an array which, if passed to the callback function (is_string() in this case) will have the callback return true.

answered Oct 14, 2014 at 13:01

anestv

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6 Comments

Balázs Édes Over a year ago

Why ask and answer instantly? :D You just wanted to share this?

user50049 Over a year ago

@bali182 we explicitly encourage this when folks discover something, or solve a problem that took some time. It's just sharing something in the form of a question someone hoping to know it would ask. You're welcome to post a separate answer if you like.

Balázs Édes Over a year ago

No, the answer is absolutely correct, I just did not find the question that much extraordinary to randomly share it.

user50049 Over a year ago

Might be worth mentioning that you can use several of the is_ functions as the callback to manage arrays (you might want to remove all non-int, or non-floats)

user50049 Over a year ago

@bali182 It's a useful question for beginners, and the title is very descriptive (folks will find it). It's come up before but the way the questions were asked doesn't lend very well to finding them, so I'm happy to have this one around I suppose :)

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