Question

I am looking for an elegant way to dedupe a 5-dimensional array like thaht :

Array
(
    [LOADERS] => Array
    (
        [S130] => Array
            (
                [527311001 & Above] => Array
                    (
                        [MAINTENANCE ITEMS] => Array
                            (
                                [0] => MAINTENANCE ITEMS
                                [1] => SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE ITEMS (50 HOUR)
                                [2] => SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE ITEMS (250 HOUR)
                                [3] => SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE ITEMS (1000 HOUR)
                                [4] => SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE ITEMS (1000 HOUR)
                                [5] => MAINTENANCE ITEMS
                                [6] => SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE ITEMS (50 HOUR)
                                [7] => SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE ITEMS (250 HOUR)
                                [8] => SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE ITEMS (500 HOUR)
                                [9] => SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE ITEMS (1000 HOUR)
                            )
                    )
            )
    )
)

Is this possible or should I use 5-nested foreach ?

Answer 1

since array_unique doesn’t work with multidimensional arrays.

you’ll have to write your own logic to do this with could be:

• a lot of nested loops, like you said

• or a recursice version of array_unique like this (taken from the documentation):

  function super_unique($array)
  {
    $result = array_map("unserialize", array_unique(array_map("serialize", $array)));
  
    foreach ($result as $key => $value)
    {
      if ( is_array($value) )
      {
        $result[$key] = super_unique($value);
      }
    }
    return $result;
  }