Question

I’d like to make an associative array in PHP where the key is a pair of strings.

At first I was considering concatenating the strings with some sort of unique divider in the middle, and then separating them later, but this seems like a hacky workaround for using a pair.

Consider the following code:

$andrew = array('Andrew', 'Rasmussen');
$john = array('John', 'Smith');
$container[$andrew] = 15;
$container[$john] = 12;

$pair = array('Andrew', 'Rasmussen');
if (array_key_exists($pair, $container)) {
    echo 'true';
} else {
    echo 'false';
}

Obviously this code will not work because you can’t use an array as a key in an array in PHP. Is there a good way to do something like this without concatenating and then later parsing the strings?

Edit

I have a reason for wanting to do this. I have an array(key=string1,value=array(key=string2,value=occurrences)) and I’m trying to find the top 5 (in terms of occurrences) of string pairs. So I’m basically trying to flatten this into a 1d array and then sort it so I can easily grab the top 5. But to do this I’ll need to be able to extract the strings out separately after I’ve sorted, which can be done with the divider algorithm explained above, but this is not preferable, which is why I’m asking for an alternative.

Answer 1

How about serializeing the key?

$pair = array('Andrew', 'Rasmussen');
if (array_key_exists( serialize( $pair), $container)) {
    echo 'true';
} else {
    echo 'false';
}