Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:42376
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain gmail.com designates 209.85.218.21 as permitted sender)
DomainKey-Status: bad
DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws;
        d=gmail.com; s=gamma;
        h=message-id:date:from:sender:to:subject:mime-version:content-type
         :x-google-sender-auth;
        b=DL1oULc5Iz6/ZaKLZ0a/P6oBXnBKWhOvz04ZJQKs4uOJBA8KVTo2qHvW59clIZoSyE
         AoGHUyhfpssTaYCJyYTzNZfvKPQt1W9ulknEtjBEbDTTkAeQ/MmIoyWrNrUEZLsNgej3
         U+ZhABZ0sXh7BoejDMgzX8bXEWMTXhmA3bKvU=
Message-ID: <5faa7b820812260106p6f24bf0ct49ef574e5ed4e2c2@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2008 01:06:10 -0800
Sender: drwoland@gmail.com
To: internals@lists.php.net
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; 
	boundary="----=_Part_119690_872692.1230282370565"
Subject: Proposal: array_flatten function
From: m@mihasya.com ("Mike Panchenko")

------=_Part_119690_872692.1230282370565
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline

Hey everybody, I'm new both to the list and to hacking the internals, so
I'll try to keep it short and humble.

I've written an array_flatten function which just takes all elements from a
nested array and pushes them into a single indexed array.

Couple of questions:

1. Most importantly, is this patch-worthy to everybody? I was a bit
surprised that it didn't already exist (it wasn't difficult to write, even
for me :) ), and a search turns up quite a few posts both on the PHP doc
comments and elsewhere detailing how to do the same in usersland PHP. There
are some pretty clear usecases for this, such as doing statistics on a
grouped dataset, as well as grabbing all values from a single-column SQL
query. It's a very simple, unobtrusive patch.

2. One of the PHP implementations "preserved keys." This seems
counterintuitive to me, as there's a high probability of overwriting, and I
can't think of a usecase where one would want to flatten out an array, but
keep the keys. Nonetheless, it was implemented by one of the snippets I saw.
Should the function offer this option with a $preserveKeys = false optional
param? If so, how should I handle duplicate keys? Failure? Warning? IMO,
it's not worthwhile, but I wanted to get opinions.

3. (this is where the noob comes in) What is the protocol on creating
patches? Should I just run the CVS patch command against a major revision? I
haven't used that before, but it seems straight forward enough. If someone
can point me to a writeup of the exact "correct" way to generate a patch,
I'd appreciate it.

Ooops, not that short I guess... Cheers.

Mike.

------=_Part_119690_872692.1230282370565--