Just want to contribute an alternative to loops...also addressing gaps in keys...
In my case I wanted to keep sequential array keys when the operation was complete (not just odd numbers, which is what I was staring at. Setting up code to look just for odd keys seemed fragile to me and not future-friendly.)
I was looking for something more like this: http://gotofritz.net/blog/howto/removing-empty-array-elements-php/
The combination of array_filter and array_slice does the trick.
$example = array_filter($example);
$example = array_slice($example,0);
No idea on efficiencies or benchmarks but it works.
