arrays - PHP case-insensitive in_array function

Question

Is it possible to do case-insensitive comparison when using the in_array function?

So with a source array like this:

$a= array(
 'one',
 'two',
 'three',
 'four'
);

The following lookups would all return true:

in_array('one', $a);
in_array('two', $a);
in_array('ONE', $a);
in_array('fOUr', $a);

What function or set of functions would do the same? I don't think in_array itself can do this.

Answer 1

The obvious thing to do is just convert the search term to lowercase:

if (in_array(strtolower($word), $array)) { 
  ...

of course if there are uppercase letters in the array you'll need to do this first:

$search_array = array_map('strtolower', $array);

and search that. There's no point in doing strtolower on the whole array with every search.

Searching arrays however is linear. If you have a large array or you're going to do this a lot, it would be better to put the search terms in key of the array as this will be much faster access:

$search_array = array_combine(array_map('strtolower', $a), $a);

then

if ($search_array[strtolower($word)]) { 
  ...

The only issue here is that array keys must be unique so if you have a collision (eg "One" and "one") you will lose all but one.