Some days ago I was working on a project and I needed to get out of an object some data, but not all of them. Specifically, I had many terms, and I needed to get only the key name from that object.
What I would have done, is looping though all the items and build an array from that with their names. But I learned about a better way!
Meet wp_list_pluck
wp_list_pluck is a default WordPress function that plucks a certain field out of an object or an array. It’s very easy to use, look at this example:
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| $foods = array( | |
| array( | |
| 'id' => 4, | |
| 'name' => 'Banana', | |
| 'color' => 'Yellow', | |
| ), | |
| array( | |
| 'id' => '5', | |
| 'name' => 'Apple', | |
| 'color' => 'Red', | |
| ), | |
| array( | |
| 'id' => 2, | |
| 'name' => 'Lettuce', | |
| 'color' => 'Green', | |
| ), | |
| array( | |
| 'id' => '7', | |
| 'name' => 'Apple', | |
| 'color' => 'Red', | |
| ), | |
| ); | |
| $foods = wp_list_pluck( $foods, 'name' ); |
If you check what $foods contains now you will get this:
array(
'Banana',
'Apple',
'Lettuce',
'Apple'
);
What happened here is that the function extracted all the names from the multi-dimensional array and created a new array with only those names.
The same could be done with objects.
You also need to know that wp_list_pluck supports a third parameter. You can specify another key from the original array that will be used as key for the values in the new array. Looking at the example above, if I use $foods = wp_list_pluck( $foods, 'name', 'id' ); I’d get this array as result:
array(
4 => 'Banana',
5 => 'Apple',
2 => 'Lettuce',
7 => 'Apple'
);
As you can see, the value of the id from the original array is now used as a key for the corresponding name in the new array.
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