PHP Arrays

These articles explain how arrays work in PHP, and show how to create and manipulate arrays.

Easy Ways to Sort Arrays in PHP

16 August 2010 / 2 Comments

As I mentioned in my earlier article, Creating Arrays in PHP, arrays are very useful if you need to store and manipulate a large amount of data in one go. One useful way you can manipulate this data is to sort it in a particular order.

PHP gives you a large number of sorting functions that can sort arrays using many different criteria. For example, you can sort in ascending or descending order, by key, or by value. These functions make it really easy to sort arrays without getting bogged down in the details of sort algorithms.

We won’t try to cover every single PHP array-sorting function in this tutorial. Instead, you’ll learn about the functions that you’re likely to find the most useful in your everyday coding.

Let’s get started!

Using Multidimensional Arrays in PHP

19 July 2010 / 16 Comments

Array elements in PHP can hold values of any type, such as numbers, strings and objects. They can also hold other arrays, which means you can create multidimensional, or nested, arrays.

In this tutorial you learn how to create multidimensional arrays, how to access elements in a multidimensional array, and how to loop through multidimensional arrays.

Using foreach to Loop Through PHP Arrays

27 May 2010 / 2 Comments

Often you need to move through all the elements in a PHP array so that you can do something with each element’s value. For example, you may want to display each value in an HTML table, or give each element a new value.

In Counting PHP Array Elements Using count(), I showed how you can use a for loop along with the count() function to loop through an array. However, there’s a much easier way to loop through arrays: the foreach construct.

In this article you learn the basic syntax of foreach, and see how to use it to loop through both indexed and associative arrays.

Counting PHP Array Elements Using count()

6 May 2010 / Leave a Comment

Often it’s useful to know how many elements an array contains. Here are some common reasons for counting the number of elements in an array:

You can then use a for loop to move through the elements
You can display the total number of elements to the user (such as the number of search results returned)
You can calculate the average of the values in the array (in conjunction with array_sum())

PHP makes it easy to count array elements, thanks to its built-in count() function. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to use count() to count the elements in both regular and multidimensional arrays, and how to move through all the elements of an indexed array by using count() and a for loop.

Extracting Elements from PHP Arrays with array_slice()

30 March 2010 / Leave a Comment

In Working With Array Elements in PHP, you saw how to read and change individual elements within a PHP array. However, sometimes it’s useful to work with a range of array elements. For example, you may want to work with a large array in chunks, or sort an array then retrieve just the “top 10” values from the start of the array.

In this tutorial you’ll explore PHP’s array_slice() function for extracting a range of elements from an array.

Working With Array Elements in PHP

19 March 2010 / 2 Comments

In Creating Arrays in PHP, you learned how PHP arrays work, and saw how to create an array using PHP.

In this article you take things further, and look at how to access the individual elements inside a PHP array. You’ll see how to:

Read element values
Alter element values
Add and remove elements in an array
Output the entire contents of an array

Creating Arrays in PHP

10 March 2010 / 3 Comments

Like most programming languages, PHP lets you create arrays. An array is a special type of variable that can hold many values at once, all accessible via a single variable name. Arrays are very useful whenever you need to work with large amounts of data — such as records from a database — or group related data together.

In this article, you’ll:

Learn how PHP arrays work, and why they’re useful
Look at the difference between indexed arrays and associative arrays, and
Learn how to create arrays within your PHP scripts.

PHP Arrays

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