Breaking a MultiDimensional Array into a Single Dimension - php

Question

I have fields in mySQL which is currently being stored like this under the field "tags"
Shopping|Health & Beauty
Coffee|Shopping
What I'm trying to do is to loop through this to create a single dimension array and to grab only the unique values.
I have my query selecting DISTINCT tags from TABLE and run the loop like this:
while ($row_tags = mysql_fetch_assoc($r_tags)) {
$tags = $row_tags['tags'];
$imploded_tags[] = explode("|",$tags);
}
echo "<pre>";
print_r($imploded_tags);
The result from the print_r is showing it as a multidimensional array. I've tried to reexplode it and implode it in different ways, but I haven't been able to get any success. Is there a way that I can create this into a single dimension array? Not all tags will have an equal amount of tags separated by |, so I can't seem to get it to go with a function that I tried from another StackOverflow post. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
OUTPUT:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[0] => Shopping
[1] => Health & Beauty
)
[1] => Array
(
[0] => Coffee
[1] => Shopping
)

Answer 1

try this
while ($row_tags = mysql_fetch_assoc($r_tags)) {
$tags = $row_tags['tags'];
$tags = explode("|",$tags);
foreach($tags as $v){
$imploded_tags[] = $v;
}
}

Answer 2

I would do something like:
$imploded_tags = array_merge(explode("|",$tags), $imploded_tags);
}
$imploded_tags = array_unique($imploded_tags);
echo "<pre>";
print_r($imploded_tags);
See the manual on array_merge and array_unique.
However, I do think you are not using the right way to store your tags; they should be stored in a separate table as separate values.

Answer 3

What's going on is when you're fetching your rows from MySQL, you're essentially getting a bunch of data in an array in the first place, which is why you have to loop through them.
With your your implode function, you're taking a bunch of strings, then getting another array set and then appending that to an external array.
If you really wanted to get a single dimensional array without having this multidimensional thing going on, all you really need to do is utilize another loop within that loop.
$all_tags = array();
while ($row_tags = mysql_fetch_assoc($r_tags)) {
$tags = $row_tags['tags'];
$imploded_tags[] = explode("|",$tags);
for($i = 0; $i < count($imploded_tags); $i++) {
$all_tags[] = $imploded_tags[$i]
}
}
print_r($all_tags);