Question

How do I properly make an array like this one to be unique ? (and by unique I mean that only the array[3] is removed as it’s a duplicate of array[2])

array(
 array( "Title", 50, 96 ),
 array( "Other Title", 110, 225 ),
 array( "Title", 110, 225 ),
 array( "Title", 110, 225 ),
)

The only array I want in this case to be filtered out is the last one (in this case), but there is no particular order, and manual labour isn’t going to cut it. (popping a targeted position). It is a rather large array, I have to think about performance here as well.

I could also arrange the data to be something like this:

array(
 array( "Title" => array( 50, 96 ), array(110, 225) )
 array( "Other Title", array( 110, 225 ) )
)

But that doesn’t help my cause this time.

There is no unique value in the array (alone), but the value combination for each second level array is unique.

Answer 1

$array = array(array("Title", 50, 96), array("Other Title", 110, 225), array("Title", 110, 225), array("Title", 110, 225));

function remove_duplicates_multi_array($array) {

    $serialized_arrays = array();
    // serialize every array
    foreach ($array as $key=>$value) {
        $serialized_arrays[$key] = serialize($value);
    }
    // use array_unique to remove duplicates
    $unique_array = array_unique($serialized_arrays);

    $multi_unique = array();

    //unserialize every item inside the array
    foreach($unique_array as $key=>$value) {
        $multi_unique[$key] = unserialize($value);
    }

    return $multi_unique;
}

var_dump(remove_duplicates_multi_array($array));