Question

I’m looking for a nice way of doing the magicFunction():

$indexes = array(1, 3, 0);

$multiDimensionalArray = array(
  '0',
  array('1-0','1-1','1-2',array('2-0','2-1','2-2')),
  array('1-4','1-5','1-6')
);

$result = magicFunction($indexes, $multiDimensionalArray);

// $result == '2-0', like if we did $result = $multiDimensionalArray[1][3][0];

Thanks.

Answer 1

My own attempt ; found it simpler by not doing it recursively, finally.

function magicFunction($arrayIndexes, $arrayData)
{
    if (!is_array($arrayData))
        throw new Exception("Parameter 'arrayData' should be an array");

    if (!is_array($arrayIndexes))
        throw new Exception("Parameter 'arrayIndexes' should be an array");

    foreach($arrayIndexes as $index)
    {
        if (!isset($arrayData[$index]))
            throw new Exception("Could not find value in multidimensional array with indexes '".implode(', ', $arrayIndexes)."'");

        $arrayData = $arrayData[$index];
    }

    return $arrayData;
}

Exceptions may be somewhat “violent” here, but at least you can know exactly what’s going on when necessary.

Maybe, for sensitive hearts, a third $defaultValue optional parameter could allow to provide a fallback value if one of the indexes isn’t found.