PHP Tutorials For Dummies | Arrays()
January 25, 2010 by Ivan
Filed under Articles, PHP, Programming
Arrays in PHP are very useful variables which can hold more than one data item. Imagine that you own a business and you want to store the names of all your employees in a PHP variable. It wouldn’t make much sense to have to store each name in its own variable. Instead, it would be nice to store all the employee names inside of a single variable. This can be done with array .
Example 1 :How To Create Arrays Without Setting Key Values
PHP Code:
<?php
$arrVar =array(“Ivan” , “David“, “John” );
echo $arrVar[0] . “<br> “;
echo $arrVar[1] . “<br> “;
echo $arrVar[2] . “<br> “;
?>
OUTPUT :
Ivan
David
John
In example 1 we created an array called $arrVar , that array contains 3 items : Ivan , David , John . To access, modify, insert items in array we use keys that are automatically(not always) set as a numeric values 0,1,2 …… as shown on image below.This means that Ivan in the array has the key 0, and the array item David lives at key 3.
Example 2 : How To Create Arrays With Setting Key Values
PHP Code:
<?php
$arrVar =array("name1"=>"Ivan" , "2"=>"David", "name3"=>"John" );
echo $arrVar[name3] . "<br> ";
echo $arrVar[2] . "<br> ";
echo $arrVar[name1] . "<br> ";
?>
OUTPUT :
John
David
Ivan
In example 1 the key value is automatically set as a numeric value, we can however change the key and set our own, like above.
Ivan in the array has the key name1, John has the key 2 and the array item David has the key name3.
Example 3: How To Create Multidimensional Array
Array does not have to be a simple list of keys and values; each array element can contain another array as a value, which in turn can hold other arrays as well. In such a way you can create multi-dimensional array.
PHP Code:
<?php
$arrVar =array ("editors"=>array("1"=>"Tommy" , "2"=>"David", "3"=>"John" ) ,
"admin"=>"Ivan",
"website"=>"hackspc.com"
);
echo $arrVar[editors][1] . “<br> “;
echo $arrVar[editors][3] . “<br> “;
echo $arrVar[admin] . “<br> “;
echo $arrVar[website] . “<br> “;
?>
OUTPUT:
Tommy
John
Ivan
hackspc.com
Example 4: How To Use Loops to display array elements
<?php
$arrVar =array("Ivan" , "David", "John" );
foreach ($arrVar as $item)
{
echo $item . "<br> ";
}
?>
OUTPUT:
Ivan
David
John
PHP provides an easy way to use every element of an array with the Foreach statement. For each item in the specified array execute this code.
While a For Loop and While Loop will continue until some condition fails, the For Each loop will continue until it has gone through every item in the array.
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James Thompson on Mon, 25th Jan 2010 6:11 pm
My favorite way to use arrays (or maybe just the most common) is to use them for storing information from a MySQL query. I use this format of nested array:
$array[row][field]
What makes it really efficient is if you can build a function to do all of that work for you.
abc on Tue, 26th Jan 2010 9:42 am
Thanks alot
Pc tricks on Fri, 5th Mar 2010 7:50 am
Very informative, thanks for sharing this,…