Array ordering

shasto100

i guys, I have 4 arrays which contain a key and value for each, the array name does not matter:

$ticket1 = ('departure' => 'Lime St', 'arrival' => 'Manchester');
$ticket2 = ('departure' => 'Manchester', 'arrival' => 'London');
$ticket3 = ('departure' => 'London', 'arrival' => 'Southampton');
$ticket4 = ('departure' => 'Southampton', 'arrival' => 'Dover');

You are given these tickets in any order. As Lime St & Dover are only used once they are the start & end of the journey.

Any help greatly appreciated, spend around 4 hours going through the numerous array functions on php.net, didn't get anywhere 🙁

laserlight

You might want to more clearly state what you are trying to do.

shasto100

Thanks for replying, you are given a number of tickets each containing a departure and arrival (no times are given). The tickets are in a mixed order, I'm just looking for the best approach to get the tickets in order:
1) Get the ones which are start and end, eg: Lime St & Dover
2) Create a seemless journey, eg: Starting at Lime St, get the Manchester train. Arrival at manchester, next get the train to London. Your next train is to Southampton etc etc.

I think I 1st have to get the first and last locations, then match the 1st location arrival to the 2nd location departure etc. Hope you understand than better.

I'm not looking for a complete solution by any means, but the best way to go really as they are so many Array functions available. Thanks.

laserlight

Okay... are you guaranteed that the tickets can be placed in order such that there is an "unbroken chain" of departure/arrival places?

Weedpacket

shasto100 wrote:
I'm not looking for a complete solution by any means, but the best way to go really as they are so many Array functions available. Thanks.

Well, there isn't going to be a function for such a specialised task: you're going to have to do some programming.

You could use array_diff to subtract the arrivals from the departures: the one that's left will be the starting point (something similar can be done to find the final destination). Now that you've got the starting point, find the corresponding arrival point and then look for that among the destinations. Repeat until you get to the final destination.

shasto100

laserlight; wrote:
Okay... are you guaranteed that the tickets can be placed in order such that there is an "unbroken chain" of departure/arrival places?

Correct yep.

Thanks Weedpacket