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An Extended Example of Retrieving Unique Data Using Laravel Helper Functions

November 18, 2016 —John Koster

This article will look at retrieving a unique list of languages using Laravel helper functions. The following student data will be used:

1<?php
2 
3$students = [
4 'student-001' => [
5 'first_name' => 'John',
6 'languages' => [
7 'count' => 2,
8 'names' => [
9 'French',
10 'English'
11 ]
12 ],
13 'courses' => [
14 'CIS 100',
15 'CIS 200'
16 ]
17 ],
18 'student-002' => [
19 'first_name' => 'Jane',
20 'languages' => [
21 'count' => 2,
22 'names' => [
23 'Spanish',
24 'English'
25 ]
26 ],
27 'courses' => [
28 'CIS 100',
29 'CIS 200'
30 ]
31 ],
32 'student-003' => [
33 'first_name' => 'Jim',
34 'courses' => [
35 'HUMA 1302'
36 ]
37 ]
38 ];

To quickly retrieve a list of all the unique languages all students speak, we can first flatten the array using the flatten method:

1<?php
2 
3$languages = Arr::flatten($languages);

which would create the following array:

1array(4) {
2 [0] "French"
3 [1] "English"
4 [2] "Spanish"
5 [3] "English"
6}

At this point PHP's array_unique can be used:

1<?php
2 
3$languages = array_unique($languages);

which would return the following array:

1array(3) {
2 [0] "French"
3 [1] "English"
4 [2] "Spanish"
5}

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