Web Application Development with PHP 4.0

Associative Arrays

Arrays are another basic structure in programming languages. Arrays provide means for storing a fixed set (or collection) of the same datatype in a convenient way, making each element of your set indexable by using a unique key.

In the typical "conventional" programming languages, arrays are handled like this:

int my_integer_array[256];          // allocate 256 integers in this array

This C code snippet declares an array called my_integer_array, containing 256 integers. You can address each of these integers by indexing the array with an ordinal value, for this array in a range from 0 to 255. (C starts counting from 0; the given number in the array definition specifies the number of integers you want to have available.) Indexing looks ...