Accessing by reference an item from an array?

[vitalyb]

The following code doesn't work, nor it really should as, reference don't work for arrays. However, how else can I make it work?

The idea is to find an item in a multidemesional array by its key and access it directly, without iterating the array each time.

	$humans[0]['human_id'] = 6;
	$humans[0]['human_name'] = 'Harry Potter';
	$humans[0]['human_items'][0]['item_id'] = 6;
	$humans[0]['human_items'][0]['item_name'] = 'Wizard stick';

$item &= get_item($humans, 'item_id');
$item = '5';

function &get_item($array, $find_key)
{
	foreach($array as $key => $array_item)
	{
		if(is_array($array_item))
		{
			$ret = get_item($array_item, $find_key);
			if($ret)
				return $ret;
		}
		else if($key == $find_key)
			return $array_item;
	}
}

What I am trying to do is to dynamically build an array representing a few multi_row queries results. In this example the array holds the result of two queries:

select from humans
and
select from items where item_id in (select * from humans)

If you know a ready class to handle such things, I'd be delighted to know.

[ahundiak]

Use human_id as the array key.

$result = mysql_query("select * from humans");
while $human =& mysql_fetch($result))
{
  $humans[$human['human_id']] =& $human;
}

// Now it's easy to get a human by their id.
$human_id = 7;
$human =& $humans[$human_id];