Maybe it’s overkill, but it’s funny to use RecursiveIterators 🙂
UPDATE: Maybe it was overkill with old versions of PHP, but with >=5.6 (specially with 7.0) I would totally use this without doubt.
function recursiveFind(array $haystack, $needle)
{
$iterator = new RecursiveArrayIterator($haystack);
$recursive = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(
$iterator,
RecursiveIteratorIterator::SELF_FIRST
);
foreach ($recursive as $key => $value) {
if ($key === $needle) {
return $value;
}
}
}
UPDATE: Also, as of PHP 5.6, with generators you can easily iterate over all elements which pass the filter, not only the first one:
function recursiveFind(array $haystack, $needle)
{
$iterator = new RecursiveArrayIterator($haystack);
$recursive = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(
$iterator,
RecursiveIteratorIterator::SELF_FIRST
);
foreach ($recursive as $key => $value) {
if ($key === $needle) {
yield $value;
}
}
}
// Usage
foreach (recursiveFind($haystack, $needle) as $value) {
// Use `$value` here
}