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While developing a new project management application I needed a way to search an array of objects for a specific object property value. For example, I had an array of “employee” objects that contain a great many properties to describe each “employee” and you want to search this array for an employee object that has a specific value for one of it’s properties. To solve this I have come up with the following little snippet:

function search_object_array($needle_key, $needle_val, $haystack)
{
	// iterate through our haystack
	for ( $i = 0; $i < count($haystack); $i++ )
	{
		// ensure this array element is an object and has a key that matches our needle's key
		if ( is_object($haystack[$i]) and property_exists($haystack[$i], $needle_key) )
		{
			// determine if comparison is case sensitive
			if ( strtolower($needle_val) == strtolower($haystack[$i]->$needle_key) ) return $i;
		}
	}
	// no match found
	return false;
}

This function returns the index of the object array if a match is found and false if no matches are found.

So lets test it.
First I’ll define a class that we will use to generate our objects that will populate our array, well call this class “foo”.

class foo
{
	public $id;
	public $name;
	public $description;

	public function __construct( $id, $name, $description )
	{
		$this->id = $id;
		$this->name = $name;
		$this->description = $description;
	}
}

Next we’ll populate our object array “$obj_arr” with objects

$obj_arr[0] = new foo(1, 'Joe', 'Joes description');
$obj_arr[1] = new foo(2, 'Sara', 'Saras description');
$obj_arr[2] = new foo(3, 'Adam', 'Adams description');
$obj_arr[3] = new foo(4, 'Jake', 'Jakes description');
$obj_arr[4] = new foo(5, 'Sally', 'Sallys description');
$obj_arr[5] = new foo(6, 'Paul', 'Pauls description');
$obj_arr[6] = new foo(7, 'Freddie', 'Freddies description');

Now lets search our new array of objects for an object that matches our criteria:

$result = search_object_array('name', 'sally', $obj_arr);
echo $result;
// will print: 4

I hope this helps!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 3:56 pm and is filed under PHP Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.