up vote -4 down vote favorite

I have an array similar to this:

array(2) {
  [0]=>
  array(2) {
    ["code"]=>
    string(2) "en"
    ["name"]=>
    string(7) "English"
  }
  [1]=>
  array(2) {
    ["code"]=>
    string(2) "bg"
    ["name"]=>
    string(9) "Bulgarian"
  }
}

How do I check if the string Bulgarian is part of the above array, or alternatively if the lang code 'en' is part of the array? It would be great if I didn't have to use foreach to loop through the entire array and compare the string with each element['code'] or element['name'].

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78% accept rate
3  
What have you tried , have you tried any code ? if so please post it in your question, so you can be helped. – Haroon Jun 13 '12 at 7:13
3  
In some form or another you'll always need a loop. Even in_array loops internally. – deceze Jun 13 '12 at 7:14
3  
" It would be great if I didn't have to use foreach to loop through the entire array and compare the string with each element" - then how would you find what you're looking for? – CodeCaster Jun 13 '12 at 7:14
@deceze, true. But that doesn't mean I'd advocate custom foreach loops over in_array() (where applicable of course). – Jason McCreary Jun 13 '12 at 7:15
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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted 
// $type could be code or name
function check_in_array($arr, $value, $type = "code") {
  return count(array_filter($arr, function($var) use ($type, $value) {
    return $var[$type] === $value;
  })) !== 0;
}
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This code looks like throwing undefined variable warnings all over the place. I wonder how TS got this to work. Also you should do an early exit if found. There is no need to count higher than one. – hakre Jun 13 '12 at 10:18
@hakre Yep, that's so. – xdazz Jun 13 '12 at 10:49
Another var was missing, still wondering about early exit, I'd say foreach ain't bad here. – hakre Jun 13 '12 at 10:51
@hakre Yep, foreach is better here, just show the way other than it – xdazz Jun 13 '12 at 10:54
My experience is this works in PHP 5.3.1 but not in 5.2.17 – twnaing Dec 18 '12 at 20:48
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up vote 0 down vote

I know my code used foreach but it is easy to understand and use.

$language=array();
$language[0]['code']='en';
$language[0]['name']='English';
$language[1]['code']='bg';
$language[1]['name']='Bulgaria';

var_dump(my_in_array('Bulgaria', $language));

function my_in_array($search, $array) {
    $in_keys = array();
    foreach($array as $key => $value){
        if(in_array($search, $value)){
            $in_keys[]=$key;
        }
    }
    if(count($in_keys) > 0){
        return $in_keys;
    }else{
        return false;
    }
}
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up vote 0 down vote

You can use this function for recursive search

function in_arrayr($needle, $haystack) {
        foreach ($haystack as $v) {
                if ($needle == $v) return true;
                elseif (is_array($v)) return in_array($needle, $v);
        }
        return false;
}

Or you can use json_encode on your array and search occurence of substring :)

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