PHP I want my search array tree

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php | Fri, 2008-10-10 11:10 tags: Developer Zone, Opinion, PHP, arrays, frameworks

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When I started doing PHP and pretty much left ASP behind I was happy because there were so many shortcomings to ASP. There were thing you could not do unless you were ready to create a program that would run on IIS. PHP did not seem to have any of those weaknesses. As a matter of fact since changing over I have not found anything in PHP that I would consider a show stopper. But this does not mean that I am totally happy with everything in the language. There are a number of times I run into something and think "Why does't this do this? While working with arrays recently I came into such a moment.

PHP has a number of tools for handling arrays. But it seems that none of them can handle two-dimensional or multi-dimesional arrays. While this may not be a show stopper it is a great annoyance, one that should be fixed or at least compensated for in the Zend framework.

<?php

$array1['key1']['key2'] = 'value';
$array2['3']['4'] = 'value2';
$arrayobject = new ArrayObject($array1);
$iterator = $arrayobject->getIterator();
echo $iterator->key(); //key
echo '<br />'; 
$arrayobject = new ArrayObject($array2);
$iterator = $arrayobject->getIterator();
echo $iterator->key(); //key
echo '<br />'; 
$search1 = array_keys($array1);
print_r($search1);
echo '<br />'; 
$search2 = array_keys($array2);
print_r($search2);
?>

The above code produces this output.

key1
3
Array ( [0] => key1 )
Array ( [0] => 3 )

As you can see only the first key is presented. There should be a construct or function in PHP that searches the entire array tree in one go. At the very least the present functions should be modified to accept parameters which would allow this to happpen. Such functionality is something that you would expect to have given the names of the functions. It is not just array_search but none of the functions that recurse through an array can do this without being placed in a loop. With such a common need for such a thing you would also think that it could be found in the Zend framework.

So far I have not found anything in the Zend framework or any of the other frameworks that has this functionality. I have even looked in Ruby and Rails to see if there was something similar. No dice. If anyone has found something like this in any of the frameworks then please let me know.

Happy Publishing!

Pia Weathers - database systems engineer

Thoughtbox - So what did you think?