PHP remove arrays by nested key value

Question

I have some arrays that I'd like to unset based on a key.

For example, let's say I have this array:

$array = array(
  'one' => array('item' => '1'),
  'two' => array('item' => '2')
);

If I want to unset the nested array with key 'two', I could do:

unset($array['two'])

or if I wanted to unset just the item array for key 'two', I could do:

unset($array['two']['item'])

I want to dynamically delete array items based on known keys. So for example, I know I want to delete ['two']['item'].

How do I pass those two arguments to a method, that can then be appended to an array?

Example:

//This works fine if it's only the first item in the array
function deleteArray($keys)
{
  unset($this->array[$keys]);
}

But when we want to delete nested items, this would not work. I could pass in the keys as an array such as array('two', 'item') and build the index off of this, but not sure how....

Any help would be great! thank you!

Aurelio De Rosa · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-29 22:06:09Z

6

You can use this function:

function delete(&$array, $keys)
{
   $key = array_shift($keys);

   if (count($keys) == 0)
      unset($array[$key]);
   else
      delete($array[$key], $keys);
}

answered Dec 29, 2011 at 22:06

Aurelio De Rosa

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Comments

ocirocir · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-29 22:18:01Z

1

Try with a recursive function:

function deleteArray(&$array, $keys) {
    if ( count($keys) == 1 )
       unset( $array[$keys[0]] );
    else
    {
       $k = array_shift($keys);
       deleteArray($array[$k],$keys); 
    }
}
deleteArray($this->arr, array("three","item","blabla")); // This erase $this->array["three"]["item"]["blabla"]

edited Dec 29, 2011 at 22:18

answered Dec 29, 2011 at 22:03

ocirocir

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Comments

Dion · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-29 21:57:22Z

0

function deleteArray($keys)
{
$keyarray = explode($keys, " ");
   unset($this->array[$keyarray[0]][$keyarray[1]]);
}

I edited it a bit (won't work!) maybe somebody could continue that. Maybe it is possible with a while() ...

edited Dec 29, 2011 at 21:57

answered Dec 29, 2011 at 21:51

Dion

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2 Comments

David Over a year ago

What if there are 10 arguments? Ideally, the number of arguments would be dynamic.

Dion Over a year ago

Well no, sry I don't know if that's possible.

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