re-indexing an array ..

Anon

hello,

i have an array and i want to delete something from that array, but then re-index the keys so they are in numerical order with no numbers being skipped.

for example:

$fruit[0]="apple";
$fruit[1]="pear";
$fruit[2]="orange";

unset($fruit[1]);

now after i unset fruit 1, i want to make it so it re-numbers the array in order .. so then orange would now be $fruit[1].

is there a way to re-number an array in order? -or-

is there a way to delete an element of an array and keep the key order?

sp0rk

I've needed the exact same thing on a few occations, but found no real good way of doing it. I ended up doing this, which isn't anything to write home about...

<?php
function unsetRekey($array,$element) {
unset($array[$element]);
foreach($array as $value) {
$returnarray[] = $value;
}
return $returnarray;
}

$fruit[0] = "apple";
$fruit[1] = "pear";
$fruit[2] = "orange";

print_r($fruit);
print("<HR>\n");
print_r(unsetRekey($fruit,1));
?>

Anon

thanks a lot !

i tried something similar, except i wasn't using the:
$returnarray[] = $value;

to re-index them .. i was trying to use something like

$i=0;
foreach($array as $value){
$returnarray[$i] = $value;
$i++;
}

that didn't seem to work for some reason and now it makes much more sense.

thanks,
-mike

jonnay

If you are going to re-index a numerical array, you should check out array_push and array_pop. using one of htoes stack functions will automagickally re-order your array. Not such a big deal when your array is only 3 elements big, but when its 500 elements big, you probably want the Zend Engine to handle the re-ordering, instead of looping through it yourself.

$fruit = array ("apples", "oranges", "bananas", "kiwis");

unset($fruit[0]); // I hate apples

/Push something onto the array temporarily to get the re-order madness to happen/
array_push($fruit, "foo");
array_pop($fruit); // pop off the foo element

There ya go.

sp0rk

Indeed a better solution, never knew the array got its keys straightened out by doing a push/pop. Thanks for the insight.