Question

I have a multidimensional array which I need to be sorted with uniqueness as I have duplicated records, so I need array_unique to go through the array and remove duplicates by the value, e.g.

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [id] => 324
            [time_start] => 1301612580
            [level] => 0.002
            [input_level] => 0.002
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [id] => 325
            [time_start] => 1301612580
            [level] => 0.002
            [input_level] => 0.002
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [id] => 326
            [time_start] => 1301612580
            [level] => 0.002
            [input_level] => 0.002
        )
)

There are duplicated time_start, which they are all the same, also level and input_level but they are not to be affected, only if there are matching time_start it should remove it and process the whole array (the array is bigger than you think, but I just posted a small example of the array). Should remove dupes and return like this:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [id] => 324
            [time_start] => 1301612580
            [level] => 0.002
            [input_level] => 0.002
        )
)

Questions I’ve found that didn’t work:

• reformat multidimensional array based on value
• Delete element from multidimensional-array based on value

Answer 1

$input = array( /* your data */ );
$temp  = array();
$keys  = array();

foreach ( $input as $key => $data ) {
    unset($data['id']);
    if ( !in_array($data, $temp) ) {
        $temp[]     = $data;
        $keys[$key] = true;
    }
}

$output = array_intersect_key($input, $keys);

or

$input = array( /* your data */ );
$temp  = $input;

foreach ( $temp as &$data ) {
    unset($data['id']);
}

$output = array_intersect_key($input, array_unique($temp));