Is there a function to extract a 'column' from an array in PHP?

Question

I have an array of arrays, with the following structure :

array(array(\'page\' => \'page1\', \'name\' => \'pagename1\')
      array(\'page\' => \'pa         


        

Answer 1

Not a 'built-in', but short arrow functions make for abrreviated explicit coding (introduced in Php v7.4.) and can be used with array_map for array transformations.

Here applying a callback to each member of the array that returns the desired attribute from each subarray:

<?php
$data =
[
    ['page' => 'page1', 'name' => 'pagename1'],
    ['page' => 'page2', 'name' => 'pagename2'],
    ['page' => 'page3', 'name' => 'pagename3']
];

$names = array_map(fn($v) => $v['name'], $data);
var_export($names);

Output:

array (
    0 => 'pagename1',
    1 => 'pagename2',
    2 => 'pagename3',
  )

The OP posted this question before array_column exisited (from Php 5.5.0). This answers the original question with a short solution:

$names = array_column($data, 'name');

But a simple loop is also trite:

foreach($data as $item) $names[] = $item['name'];

Answer 2

Why does it have to be a built in function? No, there is none, write your own.

Here is a nice and easy one, as opposed to others in this thread.

$namearray = array();

foreach ($array as $item) {
    $namearray[] = $item['name'];
}