Question

I’ve got the current array

array
   161 => 
     array
        'cat_id' => string '5' (length=1)
        'temp_id' => string '2' (length=1)
        'prod_id' => string '44' (length=2)
   162 => 
     array
        'cat_id' => string '3' (length=1)
        'temp_id' => string '2' (length=1)
        'prod_id' => string '44' (length=2)
   164 => 
     array
        'cat_id' => string '2' (length=1)
        'temp_id' => string '2' (lenth=1)
        'prod_id' => string '45' (length=2)

I am using this function to remove the duplicate array values:

function removeDupes($array) {
    $temp = array();
    foreach ($array as $k => &$v) {
        if (in_array($v['prod_id'],$temp)) {
            unset($array[$k]);
        }
        $temp[] = $v['prod_id'];
    }
    return $array;
}

This removes any duplicate value in the array if prod_id is a duplicate in a previous array.

I’d like to maintain the full category id list for the product and at the moment, these get deleted when I unset the entire key=>value pair.

Has anyone got any ideas how I could achieve this?

EDIT as per comment:

I’m looking for something like this as a result:

array
    161 =>
        'cat_id' => array('5','3')
        'prod_id' => 44

So I have removed the duplicate array entry that duplicated the product ID but maintained the Category ID’s. I hope that helps.

Answer 1

Maybe something like this:

$input = array(); // define your array
$output = array(); // here will be output
$temp = array();
foreach($input as $key => $value)
{
    if (isset($temp[$value['prod_id']]))
    {
        $output[$temp[$value['prod_id']]]['cat_id'][] = $value['cat_id'];
    }
    else
    {
        $output[$key] = array(
            'cat_id' => array($value['cat_id']),
            'prod_id' => $value['prod_id']
        );
        $temp[$value['prod_id']] = $key;
    }
}