PHP 8.2 - implementing Nested Array Merging Not Preserving Keys
I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I've been working on this all day and Could someone explain I'm a bit lost with I'm working with an unexpected behavior when trying to merge nested arrays in PHP 8.2..... I'm using the `array_merge()` function to combine two arrays, but I've noticed that it's not preserving the keys of the nested arrays as I expected. Here’s the relevant part of my code: ```php $array1 = [ 'first' => [ 'name' => 'John', 'age' => 30 ], 'second' => [ 'name' => 'Jane', 'age' => 25 ] ]; $array2 = [ 'first' => [ 'location' => 'USA' ], 'third' => [ 'name' => 'Mike', 'age' => 22 ] ]; $merged = array_merge($array1, $array2); var_dump($merged); ``` The output I'm getting is: ``` array(3) { [0]=> array(2) { ["name"]=> string(4) "John" ["age"]=> int(30) } [1]=> array(2) { ["name"]=> string(4) "Jane" ["age"]=> int(25) } [2]=> array(1) { ["location"]=> string(3) "USA" } [3]=> array(2) { ["name"]=> string(4) "Mike" ["age"]=> int(22) } } ``` I expected the keys to be preserved, so the merged output should ideally still have `first` and `third` as keys. Instead, PHP appears to be re-indexing the arrays. I've tried using `array_merge_recursive()` as well, but it still doesn't seem to give me the desired structure. What am I missing? Should I consider a different approach for merging these arrays while preserving the keys? Any insights would be appreciated! This is part of a larger microservice I'm building. Is there a better approach? Any ideas what could be causing this? I'm using Php LTS in this project. Any ideas what could be causing this? Thanks for any help you can provide!