up vote 2 down vote favorite

Is it possible to remove a string (see example below) from a PHP array without knowing the index?

Example:

array = array("string1", "string2", "string3", "string4", "string5");

I need to remove string3.

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2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted 
$index = array_search('string3',$array);
if($index !== FALSE){
    unset($array[$index]);
}

if you think your value will be in their more than once try using array_keys with a search value to get all of the indexes. You'll probably want to make sure

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I like this +1 for you. But, how can I confirm that it was removed (display on screen)? – Zachary Brown Nov 8 '10 at 1:38
Check out the php functions print_r and var_dump. You can use them to dump the contents of your array. – GWW Nov 8 '10 at 1:39
up vote -1 down vote

It sort of depends how big the array is likely to be, and there's multiple options.

If it's typically quite small, array_diff is likely the fastest consistent solution, as Jorge posted.

Another solution for slightly larger sets:

$data = array_flip($data);
unset($data[$item2remove]);
$data = array_flip($data);

But that's only good if you don't have duplicate items. Depending on your workload it might be advantageous to guarantee uniqueness of items too.

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