Question

I have an array $templates that looks like this:

        Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [displayName] => First Template
            [fileName] => path_to_first_template
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [displayName] => Second Template
            [fileName] => path_to_second_template
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [displayName] => Third template
            [fileName] => path_to_third_template
        )

)

And I want to make it to look like this:

        Array
(
    [path_to_first_template] => First Template
    [path_to_second_template] => Second Template
    [path_to_third_template] => Third Template
)

That is, I want the fileName of the nested arrays to be the new array’s key and displayName to be its value.

Is there a pretty way to do this without having to loop through the array. I had no luck searching, as I didn’t know exactly what to search for.

Answer 1

Here’s a classic foreach in action:

$result = array();
foreach($array as $row) {
    $result[$row['fileName']] = $row['displayName'];
};

Here’s a “clever” way to do it:

$result = array();
array_walk($array, function($row) use (&$result) {
    $result[$row['fileName']] = $row['displayName'];
});

As you can see, the second approach is not really better than the first one. The only advantage is that theoretically you can pile upon the second form because it is a single expression, but in practice it’s a long enough expression already so you wouldn’t want to do that.