Question

I am trying to prevent duplicates from occuring in a final array. I am trying to check for duplicates in a list of $media_candidate objects and compile them:

$iterator = 0;

// ensure items in final array are unique
while ((count($final_array) < $numResults) && ($iterator < count($media_data))) {
    $media_candidate = $media_data[$iterator++];

    if(!in_array($media_candidate['id'], $final_array)){
         $final_array[] = $media_candidate;
    }
}

As you can see in a print out of $final_array the last three elements are appearing 3 times with id, 343050519221992426_18478933. Any ideas as to what’s going on?

Answer 1

First of all: You do not truncate the final array, so that all doublettes will end up at the end.

Second: You are reinventing the wheel: Read up on array_unique()

Edit

Third: After your edit, there is an even easier way:

$final_array=array(); 
foreach($media_data as $m) $final_array[$m['id']]=$m;
//You might want the next line or not
$final_array=array_values($final_array); 

In essence you outsource the uniqueness to the hash keys of the array.