The way you would do this and preserve the ordering of the array is by putting the array keys into a separate array, find and replace the key in that array and then combine it back with the values.

Here is a function that does just that:

function change_key( $array, $old_key, $new_key) { if( ! array_key_exists( $old_key, $array ) ) return $array; $keys = array_keys( $array ); $keys[ array_search( $old_key, $keys ) ] = $new_key; return array_combine( $keys, $array ); } 

The way you would do this and preserve the ordering of the array is by putting the array keys into a separate array, find and replace the key in that array and then combine it back with the values.

Here is a function that does just that:

function change_key( $array, $old_key, $new_key ) { if( ! array_key_exists( $old_key, $array ) ) return $array; $keys = array_keys( $array ); $keys[ array_search( $old_key, $keys ) ] = $new_key; return array_combine( $keys, $array ); }