About searcing in multi-dimentional arrays; two notes on "xfoxawy at gmail dot com";
It perfectly searches through multi-dimentional arrays combined with array_column() (min php 5.5.0) but it may not return the values you'd expect.
<?php array_search($needle, array_column($array, 'key')); ?>
Since array_column() will produce a resulting array; it won't preserve your multi-dimentional array's keys. So if you check against your keys, it will fail.
For example;
<?php
$people = array(
2 => array(
'name' => 'John',
'fav_color' => 'green'
),
5=> array(
'name' => 'Samuel',
'fav_color' => 'blue'
)
);
$found_key = array_search('blue', array_column($people, 'fav_color'));
?>
Here, you could expect that the $found_key would be "5" but it's NOT. It will be 1. Since it's the second element of the produced array by the array_column() function.
Secondly, if your array is big, I would recommend you to first assign a new variable so that it wouldn't call array_column() for each element it searches. For a better performance, you could do;
<?php
$colors = array_column($people, 'fav_color');
$found_key = array_search('blue', $colors);
?>
