Remove a specific item from an array in PHP

Following from yesterday’s more-specific post about removing items from the WordPress editor, here’s an easy way to remove a specific element from a PHP array by key instead of index:

function my_remove_array_item( $array, $item ) {
	$index = array_search($item, $array);
	if ( $index !== false ) {
		unset( $array[$index] );
	}

	return $array;
}

Usage:

$items = array( 'first', 'second', 'third');
$items = my_remove_array_item( $items, 'second' ); // remove item called 'second'

This works by searching the array for the specified item, returning its key, and then unsetting that key.

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