Question

I am using preg_match_all to pull phone numbers from a thread. This puts them into an array, im applying both rsort and array_unique to the matches variable, however they have no effect what so ever… The array_unique would eliminate matches that only come up from a quote or response duplicate, and the rsort should make the last index the first, the second to last index, second, etc…

preg_match_all('~0-9]{3}-[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}~', $data, $matches) 
$result = array_unique($matches);
rsort($result);
var_dump($result);

Output:

array
0 => 
array
  0 => string '111-111-1111' (length=12)
  1 => string '222-222-2222' (length=12)
  2 => string '333-333-3333' (length=12)
  3 => string '444-444-4444' (length=12)
  4 => string '555-555-5555' (length=12)
  5 => string '555-555-5555' (length=12)
  6 => string '555-555-5555' (length=12)

Needs to be:

array
0 => 
array
  0 => string '555-555-5555' (length=12)
  1 => string '444-444-4444' (length=12)
  2 => string '333-333-3333' (length=12)
  3 => string '222-222-2222' (length=12)
  4 => string '111-111-1111' (length=12)

Answer 1

I think you need the first element in the matches array.

preg_match_all('~0-9]{3}-[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}~', $data, $matches) 
$aList = $matches[0];
$result = array_unique($aList);

rsort($result);
var_dump($result);