Question

Ok, I need keys to be preserved within this array and I just want to shift the 1st element from this array. Actually I know that the first key of this array will always be 1 when I do this:

// Sort it by 1st group and 1st layout.
ksort($disabled_sections);
    foreach($disabled_sections as &$grouplayout)
        ksort($grouplayout);

Basically I’d rather not have to ksort it in order to grab this array where the key = 1. And, honestly, I’m not a big fan of array_shift, it just takes to long IMO. Is there another way. Perhaps a way to extract the entire array where $disabled_sections[1] is found without having to do a foreach and sorting it, and array_shift. I just wanna add $disabled[1] to a different array and remove it from this array altogether. While keeping both arrays keys structured the way they are. Technically, it would even be fine to do this:

$array = array();
$array = $disabled_sections[1];

But it needs to remove it from $disabled_sections. Can I use something like this approach…

$array = array();
$array = $disabled_sections[1];
$disabled_sections -= $disabled_sections[1];

Is something like the above even possible??

Thanks.

Answer 1

While there’s no -= operator in that fashion, you can use unset to remove that element from an array:

unset(disabled_sections[1]);

But that’s just implementing your own version of shift. I do wonder under what situation you’re finding array_shift() to be ‘slow’ and how you’re testing said slowness.

Numeric arrays are sorted numerical by default – no ksort is required. Maybe you should try something like

while($array = array_shift($group_of_arrays)) {

  // ... do stuff
}

If you are not concerned about the order in which you pull elements out of the array, you can use “array_pop” instead of “array_shift”. Since “array_pop” takes the elements off of the end of the array, no reindexing is required and performance increases dramatically. In testing with an array of about 80,000 entries I am seeing about a 90% decrease in processing time with “array_pop”.