Question

I have an array of the following structure:

$some_array = array(
    array(
        'font' => 'Arial',
        'label' => 'Arial'
    ),
    array(
        'font' => 'PT+Sans:400',
        'label' => 'PT Sans'
    )
);

Let’s say that I only know that one item has ‘font’ value of ‘PT+Sans:400’ and I need to retrieve the ‘label’ value of that single item. How can I do it easier than iterating through subarrays?

Answer 1

Since you are already using foreach you just want other alternatives then you can consider this solutions

Solution 1

You can try to filter your search using array_filter

$search = "PT+Sans:400" ;
$array = array_filter($array,function($v)use($search){ return $v['font'] == $search;});
var_dump($array); // returns all found array 

Output

array
  1 => 
    array
      'font' => string 'PT+Sans:400' (length=11)
      'label' => string 'PT Sans' (length=7)

If you need only the label

$find = array_shift($array); // take only the first
print($find['label']);  // output the label 

Output

PT Sans

Solution 2

It you are not interested in return the array and all you want is just the label then you should consider array_reduce

$search = "PT+Sans:400" ;
$results = array_reduce($array,function($a,$b)use($search){ return $b['font'] == $search ? $b['label'] : null ; });
print($results);

Output

PT Sans