Question

Let’s say if the user is able to select some directories to search. And he checkmarks the following directories below:

http://google.com/apple
http://google.com/apple/red
http://google.com/apple/green
http://google.com/apple/yellow
http://google.com/orange
http://google.com/orange/1

When getting ready to insert this data in lets say a database. Is there a way so I can simplify the list via PHP in order to show something like below:

http://google.com/apple
http://google.com/orange

Thanks
Cyrus

Answer 1

This should do the trick:

sort( $paths );

$previous = $paths[0];
$simplified = array( $previous );

foreach ( $paths as $path ) {
    if ( $previous != substr( $path, 0, strlen( $previous ) ) ) {
        $simplified[] = $previous = $path;
    }
}

This code relies on the fact that a string sorts just before any extensions of itself. Note that it doesn’t treat slashes in any special way, and so it considers, say, "quux/foo" to be a valid prefix of "quux/foobar" (and this is not as easy to fix properly as I first thought it would be). If you don’t want that, make sure your paths have trailing slashes where appropriate.