Let's say, you have a multidimensional array like this:
<?php
$cars = [
[
"id" => 1,
"name" => "Mercedes Benz",
"color" => "Black"
],
[
"id" => 2,
"name" => "Toyota",
"color" => "Red"
],
[
"id" => 3,
"name" => "Toyota",
"color" => "White"
],
[
"id" => 4,
"name" => "Nissan",
"color" => "Grey"
],
];
?>
And say, you want to be able to return unique cars by name or color, use this method:
<?php
function multi_array_unique($array, $key) {
$i = 0;
$temp_array = [];
$key_array = [];
foreach($array as $val) {
// insert only unique keys
if (!in_array($val[$key], $key_array)) {
$key_array[$i] = $val[$key];
$temp_array[$i] = $val;
}
$i++;
}
return $temp_array;
}
?>
Call this method from anywhere in your code like this:
<?php
$unique_cars = multi_array_unique($cars, "name");
dd($unique_cars);
?>
And now, you'll get something like this:
<?php
[
[
"id" => 1,
"name" => "Mercedes Benz",
"color" => "Black"
],
[
"id" => 2,
"name" => "Toyota",
"color" => "Red"
],
[
"id" => 4,
"name" => "Nissan",
"color" => "Grey"
],
];
?>
You might wonder why I tried this instead of PHP's array_unique() method and the reason I didn't use it is because it doesn't support multidimensional arrays.
Hope you found this useful!