PHP: How to use array_filter() to filter array keys?

With array_intersect_key and array_flip:

var_dump(array_intersect_key($my_array, array_flip($allowed)));

array(1) {
  ["foo"]=>
  int(1)
}

PHP 5.6 introduced a third parameter to array_filter(), flag, that you can set to ARRAY_FILTER_USE_KEY to filter by key instead of value:

$my_array = ['foo' => 1, 'hello' => 'world'];
$allowed  = ['foo', 'bar'];
$filtered = array_filter(
    $my_array,
    function ($key) use ($allowed) {
        return in_array($key, $allowed);
    },
    ARRAY_FILTER_USE_KEY
);

Clearly this isn't as elegant as array_intersect_key($my_array, array_flip($allowed)), but it does offer the additional flexibility of performing an arbitrary test against the key, e.g. $allowed could contain regex patterns instead of plain strings.

You can also use ARRAY_FILTER_USE_BOTH to have both the value and the key passed to your filter function. Here's a contrived example based upon the first, but note that I'd not recommend encoding filtering rules using $allowed this way:

$my_array = ['foo' => 1, 'bar' => 'baz', 'hello' => 'wld'];
$allowed  = ['foo' => true, 'bar' => true, 'hello' => 'world'];
$filtered = array_filter(
    $my_array,
    function ($val, $key) use ($allowed) { // N.b. $val, $key not $key, $val
        return isset($allowed[$key]) && (
            $allowed[$key] === true || $allowed[$key] === $val
        );
    },
    ARRAY_FILTER_USE_BOTH
); // ['foo' => 1, 'bar' => 'baz']

I needed to do same, but with a more complex array_filter on the keys.

Here's how I did it, using a similar method.

// Filter out array elements with keys shorter than 4 characters
$a = array(
  0      => "val 0", 
  "one"  => "val one", 
  "two"  => "val two", 
  "three"=> "val three", 
  "four" => "val four", 
  "five" => "val five", 
  "6"    => "val 6"
); 

$f = array_filter(array_keys($a), function ($k){ return strlen($k)>=4; }); 
$b = array_intersect_key($a, array_flip($f));
print_r($b);

This outputs the result:

Array
(
    [three] => val three
    [four] => val four
    [five] => val five
)