Question

I have a PHP array which looks like this example:

$array[0][0] = 'apples';
$array[0][1] = 'pears';
$array[0][2] = 'oranges';

$array[1][0] = 'steve';
$array[1][1] = 'bob';

And I would like to be able to produce from this a table with every possible combination of these, but without repeating any combinations (regardless of their position), so for example this would output

Array 0            Array 1
apples             steve
apples             bob
pears              steve
pears              bob

But I would like for this to be able to work with as many different arrays as possible.

Answer 1

this is called “cartesian product”, php man page on arrays http://php.net/manual/en/ref.array.php shows some implementations (in comments).

and here’s yet another one:

function array_cartesian() {
    $_ = func_get_args();
    if(count($_) == 0)
        return array(array());
    $a = array_shift($_);
    $c = call_user_func_array(__FUNCTION__, $_);
    $r = array();
    foreach($a as $v)
        foreach($c as $p)
            $r[] = array_merge(array($v), $p);
    return $r;
}

$cross = array_cartesian(
    array('apples', 'pears',  'oranges'),
    array('steve', 'bob')
);

print_r($cross);