Populating a PHP array within a foreach loop

Question

I am wanting to add each user into an array and check for duplicates before I do.

 $spotcount = 10;    


for ($topuser_count = 0; $topuser_count < $spotcount; $topuser_count++)     //total spots
{

$spottop10 = $ids[$topuser_count];
$top_10 = $gowalla->getSpotInfo($spottop10);
$usercount = 0;
$c = 0;
$array = array();

foreach($top_10['top_10'] as $top10)        //loop each spot
{
    //$getuser = substr($top10['url'],7);       //strip the url
    $getuser = ltrim($top10['url'], " users/" );

    if ($usercount < 3)     //loop only certain number of top users
     {  
        if (($getuser != $userurl) && (array_search($getuser, $array) !== true)) {

            //echo " no duplicates! <br /><br />";
            echo ' <a href= "http://gowalla.com'.$top10['url'].'"&gt;&lt;img width="90" height="90"  src= " '.$top10['image_url'].' " title="'.$top10['first_name'].'" alt="Error" /></a>     ';                              
            $array[$c++] = $getuser;



        }
        else {

            //echo "duplicate <br /><br />";
        }

    }
    $usercount++;
}
print_r($array);    


}

The previous code prints:

Array ( [0] => 62151 [1] => 204501 [2] => 209368 ) Array ( [0] => 62151 [1] => 33116 [2] => 122485 ) Array ( [0] => 120728 [1] => 205247 [2] => 33116 ) Array ( [0] => 150883 [1] => 248551 [2] => 248558 ) Array ( [0] => 157580 [1] => 77490 [2] => 52046 )

Which is wrong. It does check for duplicates, but only the contents of each foreach loop instead of the entire array. How is this if I am storing everything into $array?

Answer 1

array_search() returns the key for whatever you're searching for, if it's in the array. You're doing a strict inequality comparison !== against true, so if array_search DOES find an entry in the array (say, key is 7), then 7 !== TRUE is true, and you proceed to add the entry to your new array.

What you want is array_search(...) !== FALSE, which will evaluate to true only if array_search fails.

Also, there's no need to use your $c++ array index counter. You can use $array[] = $getuser which will automatically stick $getuser into a new entry at the end the array.

Answer 2

use below function for multidimensional array

function in_multiarray($elem, $array)
    {
        $top = sizeof($array) - 1;
        $bottom = 0;
        while($bottom <= $top)
        {
            if($array[$bottom] == $elem)
                return true;
            else
                if(is_array($array[$bottom]))
                    if(in_multiarray($elem, ($array[$bottom])))
                        return true;

            $bottom++;
        }       
        return false;
    }

for more information see the in_array()

Answer 3

Faster and cleaner Recursive multidimensional array search, using the Standard PHP Library (SPL).

function in_array_recursive($needle, $haystack) {
    $it = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(new RecursiveArrayIterator($haystack));

    foreach($it as $element) {
        if($element == $needle) {
            return true;
        }
    }

    return false;
}