How to allow duplicate keys in php array

php arrays duplicates
sudh picture sudh · Mar 26, 2011 · Viewed 86.1k times · Source

How to allow php array to have duplicate keys? When I try to insert a key, value pair with already existing key it overwrites the value of corresponding previous key with the new value. Is there a way that I could maintain both duplicate keys having different values?

Answer

Mike Lewis picture Mike Lewis · Mar 26, 2011

You could have a single key that has a value of an array(aka a multi-dimensional array), which would contain all the elements with that given key. An example might be

$countries = array(
  "United States" => array("California", "Texas"),
  "Canada" => array("Ontario", "Quebec")
);

Related questions

php: check if an array has duplicates

I'm sure this is an extremely obvious question, and that there's a function that does exactly this, but I can't seem to find it. In PHP, I'd like to know if my array has duplicates in it, as efficiently as …

Read More
Remove duplicate items from an array

I use the line of code below to loop through a table in my database: $items_thread = $connection -> fetch_all($sql); And if I print the array out: print_r($items_thread); I will get this: Array ( [0] => …

Read More
Check and return duplicates array php

I would like to check if my array has any duplicates and return the duplicated values in an array. I want this to be as efficient as possible. Example: $array = array( 1, 2, 2, 4, 5 ); function return_dup($array); // should return 2 $array2 = array( 1, 2, 1, 2, 5 ); function …

Read More