Understanding Arrays in PHP

An array is a systemic arrangement of objects. Hum, what does this mean? Well in programming an array is a type of data structure. Each array can hold several pieces of information. It’s sort of like a variable in that it stores data, but not at all like a variable in that instead of storing one bit of information it can store many pieces of information. Let’s start with an example. Let’s say that you are storing information about people. You could have a variable that stored my name â€Å"Angela†. But in an array, you could store my name, my age, my height, my In this sample code, we will look at storing two bits of information at a time, the first being somebody’s name and the second being their favorite color. In this example code, you can see that the friend array is sorted by number, and contains a list of friends. In the second array, color, instead of using numbers it uses strings to identify the different bits of information. The identifier used to retrieve data from the array is called it’s key. In our first example, the keys were integers 0, 1, 2, and 3. In our second example, the keys were strings. In both cases, we are able to access the data held in the array by using both the array’s name, and the key. Like variables, arrays always start with a dollar sign ($array) and they are case sensitive. They can not start with an underscore or a number, you must start them with a letter. So, to put it simply, an array is kind of like a variable with lots of little variables inside of it. But what exactly do you do with an array? And how is it useful to you as a PHP programmer? In practice, you will probably never create an array like the one in the example above. The most useful thing you can do with an array in PHP is to use it to hold information you get form somewhere else. Having your websites information stored in an MySQL database is not uncommon. When your website needs certain information it simply accesses your database, and wha-laa, on demand data. Let’s say you have a database of people who live in your city. You now want to search that database and print out records for anyone named â€Å"Tom†. How would you go about doing this? You would read through the database for people named Tom, and then pull their name and all the other information about them from the database, and place it in an array inside of your program. You are then able to cycle through this array, and print out the information or store it to use elsewhere in your program. On the surface, an array might not look that interesting to you, but when you do more programming and start storing more complex data structures you will find you are often writing them to arrays when they need to be used.