Question

For two days I’ve been running crazy trying to accomplish this, maybe you can enlighten me. This is for a horse betting permutation. Every time a user plays, I get a multidimensional array (2 levels). The first level contains the race ID, the the second level contains thee horses selected by the user for that race. It looks like this:

$play = array
(
    '4' => array(7, 32),
    '8' => array(4),
    '2' => array(9),
    '12' => array('5'),
    '83' => array('10', '11', '12', ''),
    '9' => array('3'),
);

I need to know what are all the possible combinations for that play. Which is easily done with this function:

function permutations(array $array)
{
    switch (count($array)) {
        case 1:
            return $array[0];
            break;
        case 0:
            throw new InvalidArgumentException('Requires at least one array');
            break;
    }

    $a = array_shift($array);
    $b = permutations($array);

    $return = array();
    foreach ($a as $key => $v) {
        if(is_numeric($v))
        {
            foreach ($b as $key2 => $v2) {
                $return[] = array_merge(array($v), (array) $v2);
            }
        }
    }

    return $return;
}

This returns an array with all the possible combinations beautifully. So far so good, and the result looks like this:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => 7
            [1] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [3] => 5
            [4] => 10
            [5] => 3
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => 7
            [1] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [3] => 5
            [4] => 11
            [5] => 3
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [0] => 7
            [1] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [3] => 5
            [4] => 12
            [5] => 3
        )

    [3] => Array
        (
            [0] => 32
            [1] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [3] => 5
            [4] => 10
            [5] => 3
        )

    [4] => Array
        (
            [0] => 32
            [1] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [3] => 5
            [4] => 11
            [5] => 3
        )

    [5] => Array
        (
            [0] => 32
            [1] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [3] => 5
            [4] => 12
            [5] => 3
        )

)

My problem: I need the array “key” for every horse to be the “race ID”, not 0,1,2,3. I need the result to be like this:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [4] => 7
            [8] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [12] => 5
            [83] => 10
            [9] => 3
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [4] => 7
            [8] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [12] => 5
            [83] => 11
            [9] => 3
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [4] => 7
            [8] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [12] => 5
            [83] => 12
            [9] => 3
        )

    [3] => Array
        (
            [4] => 32
            [8] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [12] => 5
            [83] => 10
            [9] => 3
        )

    [4] => Array
        (
            [4] => 32
            [8] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [12] => 5
            [83] => 11
            [9] => 3
        )

    [5] => Array
        (
            [4] => 32
            [8] => 4
            [2] => 9
            [12] => 5
            [83] => 12
            [9] => 3
        )

)

How can I accomplish this? I know its a long post but I needed to graph this. I am having problems to wrap my head around the function recursion and I get totally lost in each loop.

Answer 1

Here’s what you need. I have commented as necessary:

function permutations(array $array)
{
    switch (count($array)) {
        case 1:
            // Return the array as-is; returning the first item
            // of the array was confusing and unnecessary
            return $array;
            break;
        case 0:
            throw new InvalidArgumentException('Requires at least one array');
            break;
    }

    // We 'll need these, as array_shift destroys them
    $keys = array_keys($array);

    $a = array_shift($array);
    $k = array_shift($keys); // Get the key that $a had
    $b = permutations($array);

    $return = array();
    foreach ($a as $v) {
        if(is_numeric($v))
        {
            foreach ($b as $v2) {
                // array($k => $v) re-associates $v (each item in $a)
                // with the key that $a originally had
                // array_combine re-associates each item in $v2 with
                // the corresponding key it had in the original array
                // Also, using operator+ instead of array_merge
                // allows us to not lose the keys once more
                $return[] = array($k => $v) + array_combine($keys, $v2);
            }
        }
    }

    return $return;
}

See it in action.

By the way, calculating all the permutations recursively is neat, but you might not want to do it in a production environment. You should definitely consider a sanity check that calculates how many permutations there are and doesn’t allow processing to continue if they are over some limit, at the very least.