Making "function arguments" consisting of comma separated arrays in PHP

1
votes

I am having problems in PHP creating functional arguments made up of arrays separated by commas, for example I want to automate the use of the array_intersect function.

The function accepts multiple arrays separated by comma's as its function arguments. E.g.:

array_intersect($setarray1, $setarray2, $setarray3, ...)

I have hundreds of different array's to process in the array_intersect function (i.e I may pass 3, 4 of 5 arrays to the function at a time).

My question is, how do I create a function argument made up of comma separated arrays that I can then pass to the array_intersect function?

Here is an example of some test data

$setsarray[]=array('all','0'            ,'0&1','0&2','0&3');
$setsarray[]=array('all'    ,'1'        ,'0&1'            ,'1&2','1&3');
$setsarray[]=array('all'        ,'2'          ,'0&2'      ,'1&2'      ,'2&3');
$setsarray[]=array('all'            ,'3'            ,'0&3'      ,'1&3','2&3');

$setnumb=count($setsarray);

Manually I can do this...

$vennGraph['all']=array_intersect(
$setsarray[$setnumb-4],$setsarray[$setnumb-3], $setsarray[$setnumb-2]
);

The function arguments are array comma array comma array e.t.c. So I want to to generate $vennGraph['Again_and_Again']=array_intersect("put my content here");

I have been reading through the responses (thankyou!) and they sound promising but I am still dumb struck! BTW, I am using PHP Version 5.3.10

ps would it be easier if I put commas into the $setsarray as shown below?

$setsarray[]=array('all','0'            ,'0&1','0&2','0&3');
$setsarray[]= ',';
$setsarray[]=array('all'    ,'1'        ,'0&1'            ,'1&2','1&3');
$setsarray[]= ',';
$setsarray[]=array('all'        ,'2'          ,'0&2'      ,'1&2'      ,'2&3');
$setsarray[]= ',';
$setsarray[]=array('all'            ,'3'            ,'0&3'      ,'1&3','2&3');
2
phparraysfunctionargument-passingarray-intersect

2 Answers

1
votes

There are two methods depending on your PHP version:

  1. The "..." token method which is only possible in PHP 5.6 and later
  2. func_num_args(), func_get_arg() and func_get_args() functions for older versions of PHP
0
votes

Your approach is wrong, you cannot concatenate arrays with commas, pass them to a function and make the function see them as separate arguments. If you write foo($bar), there's only one argument passed to foo, regardless of how many commas might be in $bar.

What you're looking for is call_user_func_array, into which you can pass an array of arrays which will be received as separate arguments by the function. PHP 5.6+ offers some syntactic sugar around this in the form of variable length argument lists.