Merging Multiple Flat Associative Arrays with Summation of Shared Keys

When combining associative arrays with the array_merge() function, values associated with shared keys tend to be replaced rather than summed. This poses a challenge when attempting to add the values of shared keys from multiple associative arrays.

To overcome this hurdle, one can adopt several approaches:

• Foreach Iteration with Error Suppression:

$sums = array();
foreach (array_keys($a1   $a2) as $key) {
    $sums[$key] = (isset($a1[$key]) ? $a1[$key] : 0)   (isset($a2[$key]) ? $a2[$key] : 0);
}

• Anonymous Mapping:

$keys = array_fill_keys(array_keys($a1   $a2), 0);
$sums = array_map(function ($a1, $a2) { return $a1   $a2; }, array_merge($keys, $a1), array_merge($keys, $a2));

• Combinational Solution:

$sums = array_fill_keys(array_keys($a1   $a2), 0);
array_walk($sums, function (&$value, $key, $arrs) { $value = @($arrs[0][$key]   $arrs[1][$key]); }, array($a1, $a2));

• Custom Function for Arbitrary Number of Arrays:

function array_sum_identical_keys() {
    $arrays = func_get_args();
    $keys = array_keys(array_reduce($arrays, function ($keys, $arr) { return $keys   $arr; }, array()));
    $sums = array();

    foreach ($keys as $key) {
        $sums[$key] = array_reduce($arrays, function ($sum, $arr) use ($key) { return $sum   @$arr[$key]; });
    }
    return $sums;
}

These approaches provide flexible solutions for merging multiple associative arrays and summing the values associated with shared keys.