I have an array within an array.
$a = array ( 0 => array ( 'value' => 'America', ), 1 => array ( 'value' => 'England', ), ) 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", $a) would not work.
Thanks.
A general solution would be:
function deep_in_array($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, $element)) return true; } return false; } PHP doesn't have a native array_search_recursive() function, but you can define one:
function array_search_recursive($needle, $haystack) { foreach ($haystack as $value) { if (is_array($value) && array_search_recursive($needle, $value)) return true; else if ($value == $needle) return true; } return false; } Untested but you get the idea.
function search($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