What would be an elegant way to merge two arrays, such that the resulting array has two items from the first array followed by a single item from the second array, repeating in this fashion?
$array1 = ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'A4', 'A5']; // potentially longer
$array2 = ['B1', 'B2', 'B3', 'B4', 'B5']; // potentially longer
Desired result:
['A1', 'A2', 'B1', 'A3', 'A4', 'B2', 'A5', 'B3', 'B4', 'B5']
I'm trying to do it using a for
loop with multiple counters, but I don't know that the array lengths will be. I'm curious: is there a better way?
Here's a simplified version of what I'm currently doing:
$x = 0, $y = 0;
for ($i = 0; $i < $total_num_blocks; $i++) {
if ($i % 3) { // if there's a remainder, it's not an 'every 3rd' item
$result[$i] = $projects[$x++];
} else {
$result[$i] = $posts[$y++];
}
}
This example will work regardless of the $a and $b array size.
<?php
$a = ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'A4', 'A5'];
$b = ['BB1', 'BB2', 'BB3', 'BB4', 'BB5'];
for ($i = 0; $i < count($b); $i++) {
array_splice($a, ($i+1)*2+$i, 0, $b[$i]);
}
echo "<pre>" . print_r($a, true) . "</pre>";
Output of this example is :
Array
(
[0] => A1
[1] => A2
[2] => BB1
[3] => A3
[4] => A4
[5] => BB2
[6] => A5
[7] => BB3
[8] => BB4
[9] => BB5
)
Warning: keys are NOT preserved!
This is PHP 5.4.x code, if you don't have it, replace [] with array() in $a and $b variables.
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