An Extended Example of Retrieving Unique Data Using Laravel Helper Functions

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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