I have a string stored in my table. It's a number of values separated by pipe:

val 1|val2|val 44 

I also have another string, separated by semi-colons that I would like to merge unique values from into the first sting.

abcd; efg; hijklmnop3; val2

So I thought that the easiest way would be to convert them into arrays, merge and keep unique and the implode back into the string.

(my loop) {
    $arr1 = array();
    $arr2 = array();
    $arr1[] = explode(';', $str1);
    $arr2[] = explode('|', $str2);
    $arr3 = implode("|",array_unique(array_merge($arr1,$arr2))); 
}

But when I try to

echo $arr3;

I get

Warning: Array to string conversion

What am I missing here?

CodePudding user response：

Just simplify to following:

$str1 = 'abcd; efg; hijklmnop3; val2';
$str2 = 'val 1|val2|val 44 ';

// explode results an array
$arr1 = array_map('trim', explode(';', $str1));
$arr2 = array_map('trim', explode('|', $str2));

// Implode results a string
$string = implode("|", array_unique(array_merge($arr1, $arr2)));

echo $string;

Results in

abcd|efg|hijklmnop3|val2|val 1|val 44

Note, that explode already returns an array. With the following you add an array to an array, but you just want the array.

$arr1[] = explode(';', $str1); is the same as array_push($arr1, explode(';', $str1));

The unique of your question failed, because you need to trim the spaces.

'val2' !== ' val2' <-- see the space