Yes you can. But imagine an array with 10,000 keys. Wouldn't it be nice to be 
able to delete all the subkeys named "myKey" in that array with just one 
command? (ok 3 to be honest) Or how about renaming all of a certain key or 
subkey? I have yet to find a command for that. Those are just two examples of 
how this could be useful. What if all I cared about in an array were all the 
keys named "emailaddress" but I wanted to put them into their own array? Once 
it's all in text form I can use filter on it, but then it's not an array 
anymore. 

Another way to use it is this: Say you had a numbered array, but the thing you 
were handing the array off to only cared about the elements at the second level 
and beyond. You could probably come up with a regex to eliminate all the lines 
beginning with a number, then convert your string data back to an array again. 
I ran into that with sqlYoga. Some data types use numbered arrays where others 
don't. 

Ever tried to combine two arrays? Add one array to the other? How about 
subtract one array from another? Convert both using printKeys(), do your string 
magic, then convert it back to an array again. Sure you could write repeat 
loops to do all that, but this makes it simple and clean. 

The drawback of course is that your array cannot contain anything but values. 
No graphics, sounds etc. 

I could be over-thinking things again because of too much coffee, but I'm 
drinking beer now and the idea still seems cool to me. ;-)

Bob

On Jan 20, 2012, at 6:44 PM, Pete wrote:

> Hi Bob,
> I might be misunderstanding your example below but you can delete a key
> from an array along with all its subkeys with "delete theArray[thekey]".
> Is that what you meant?
> 
> On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Bob Sneidar <b...@twft.com> wrote:
> 
>> Why you say? Lets say you have an array that you want to delete one key
>> from, say in this case all the secondkey keys. You would have to loop
>> through all the keys deleting each instance of secondkey.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Pete
> Molly's Revenge <http://www.mollysrevenge.com>
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