In PHP, how do you change the key of an array element?

Question

I have an associative array in the form key => value where key is a numerical value, however it is not a sequential numerical value. The key is actually an I

Answer 1

The way you would do this and preserve the ordering of the array is by putting the array keys into a separate array, find and replace the key in that array and then combine it back with the values.

Here is a function that does just that:

function change_key( $array, $old_key, $new_key ) {

    if( ! array_key_exists( $old_key, $array ) )
        return $array;

    $keys = array_keys( $array );
    $keys[ array_search( $old_key, $keys ) ] = $new_key;

    return array_combine( $keys, $array );
}