I have an array within an array.
$array = [
['foo' => 'bar', 'value' => 'America'],
['value' => 'England', 'bar' => 'food'],
];
How do I check if 'America' exists in the array? The America array could be any key, and there could be any number of subarrays, so a generalized solution please.
Looking on the php manual, I see in_array(), but that only works for the top layer. so something like in_array("America", $a) would not work.
A general solution would be:
function deep_in_array($needle, $haystack) {
if(in_array($needle, $haystack)) {
return true;
}
foreach($haystack as $element) {
if(is_array($element) && deep_in_array($needle, $element))
return true;
}
return false;
}
The reason why I chose to use in_array and a loop is: Before I examine deeper levels of the array structure, I make sure, that the searched value is not in the current level. This way, I hope the code to be faster than doing some kind of depth-first search method.
Of course if your array is always 2 dimensional and you only want to search in this kind of arrays, then this is faster:
function in_2d_array($needle, $haystack) {
foreach($haystack as $element) {
if(in_array($needle, $element))
return true;
}
return false;
}
return after if(is_array...) is problematic. You cannot do a return for each element. Instead you should only return if call to deep_in_array returns true.
PHP doesn't have a native array_search_recursive() function, but you can define one:
function array_search_recursive($needle, $haystack) {
foreach ($haystack as $value) {
if (is_array($value) && array_search_recursive($needle, $value)) return true;
else if ($value == $needle) return true;
}
return false;
}
Untested but you get the idea.
in_array("America", array_column($a, 'value'))
function search($a,$searchval){ //$a - array; $searchval - search value;
if(is_array($a)) {
foreach($a as $val){
if(is_array($val))
if(in_array($searchval,$val)) return true;
}
}
else return false;
}
search($a, 'America'); //function call
Using PHP8.4 or a polyfill, you can enjoy a fully functional-style snippet and the performance boost of short-circuiting without needing to manually write a conditionally break. Demo
$find = 'America';
var_export(
array_any(
$array,
fn($row) => in_array($find, $row)
)
);
// true