Re: Proposal: array_flatten function

Lukas, Hmmm I'm just trying to solve the basic problem (hence my skepticism towards preserving keys - it seems an edge case). I think once you get to more specific requirements, iterators are probably the way to go, since all the standard functions you could use to shorten this would re-iterate over the array internally anyway. Cheers. Mike. On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 7:56 AM, Lukas Kahwe Smith <mls@pooteeweet.org>wrote: > In one of my recent projects I had the need for something like this. I > essentially had a recursive data structure of organizations and frequently I > had to get a list of all organization ID's that were above or underneath a > given organization. So I had to write a deeply self join which would produce > lets say around 3-4 columns that either contained an ID or were NULL. > > I ended up with an implementation like the following. Actually looking at > it now it seems way too complex but it works, so it goes: > function flattenArray($array) { > if (empty($array)) { > return array(); > } > $first = reset($array); > if (empty($first)) { > return array(); > } > $keys = array_keys($first); > $result = array(); > foreach ($array as $row) { > foreach ($keys as $key) { > if (!empty($row[$key])) { > $result[] = $row[$key]; > } > } > } > $result = array_unique($result); > return $result; > } > > So I guess what I am asking for is a flag to ignore NULL's. Kind of reminds > me of that patch Igor proposed the other day. Then again, we have sooooo > many array functions its not even funny. So maybe we really should look more > towards Iterators to help us consolidate things. Not sure. > > regards, > Lukas >