How to remove all PHP array elements containing a certain sub-string?

Question

ok i looked up some functions and i don't seem to lucky of finding any,

i wanna filter an array to strip specific array that contains some string

heres an example :

$array(1 => 'January', 2 => 'February', 3 => 'March',);
$to_remove = "Jan"; // or jan || jAn, .. no case sensitivity
$strip = somefunction($array, $to_remove);
print_r($strip);

it should return

[1] => February
[2] => March

a function that looks for the sub-string for all values in an array, if the sub-string is found, remove that element from the array

http://php.net/array_filter? PHP's functions are pretty easy to find, and named after what they do... — Marc B, May 06 '12 at 20:56
after 7 questions one of them at least must of had an acceptable answer. — , May 06 '12 at 20:57
@marc yes but php doesn't has that much info about this function, i want to see how it works like how i want it above — Lili Abedinpour, May 06 '12 at 20:58
The linked PHP doc page has plenty of examples on how to use the function. — Marc B, May 06 '12 at 20:59
several dozen examples on the manual page, what more do you want? — , May 06 '12 at 21:00
yup but it looks so long and my laziness won't read all this thing lol, can someone use that function with the example i wrote, thanks — Lili Abedinpour, May 06 '12 at 21:01

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered May 06 '12 at 21:03

11

You can use array_filter and stripos

$array = array(1 => 'January', 'February', 'March');
print_r(array_filter($array, function ($var) { return (stripos($var, 'Jan') === false); }));

answered May 06 '12 at 21:03

mpratt

1,598
12
21

1

By using the stripos function, you should not have to worry about case sensitivity. – mpratt May 06 '12 at 21:10
one last question, how to only returns arrays that contains a specific string ? – Lili Abedinpour May 06 '12 at 21:25
Then Change the `=== false` with `!== false`. In this case `return (stripos($var, 'fEb') !== false)`. – mpratt May 06 '12 at 21:30
Hey, i have a question for you. Instead of making a new question i shall first try my luck here. What you wrote works perfectly however, how can i make it to specificly delete 'a' for example. Because if i run it like this it will also delete array entries which are `apple` or `banana`. If you don't mind be asking another question. What if the words im looking for is in an array named $common_words. So instead of just 'Jan' in your example I have a whole array of words. – Déjà vu Apr 11 '14 at 12:31

score 5 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 02 '18 at 23:34

5

You can use array_filter() with a closure (inline-function):

array_filter(
  $array,
  function ($element) use ($to_remove) {
    return strpos($element, $to_remove) === false;
  }
);

(PHP Version >= 5.3)

edited Aug 02 '18 at 23:34

dreftymac

31,404
26
119
182

answered May 06 '12 at 21:03

MonkeyMonkey

826
1
6
19

score -1 · Answer 3 · answered May 06 '12 at 21:03

The simplest way is with array_filter. This function receives the array to filter and a callback function that does the actual filtering based on the value received:

function filter_func( $v )
{
  return ( ( $var % 2 ) == 0 );
}
$test_array = array( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 );
print_r( array_filter( $test_array, "filter_func" ) );

Hope helped!

How to remove all PHP array elements containing a certain sub-string?

3 Answers3

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