Chapter 13. Arrays

13.1. Basics

An array in PHP is a powerful structure for a script to remember a conglomeration of data. You should think of an as a collection of associations between keys and their corresponding values. For example: I might want to have an array that associates people's names with their addresses. We might choose the address to be the key, and the name to be the value associated with each key. Thus, associated with the key 221B I would find the value Sherlock Holmes. (If you happen to have seen the array notion in a different programming language, forget what you learned: PHP's notion of array is rather unusual.)

An array is referenced using a single variable, such as $residents. To retrieve the value associated with a key, place the value into brackets following the variable name. Thus, given echo $residents["221B"]; PHP will echo Sherlock Holmes.

We place a value into the array using this same bracket notation, but now on the left sign of an assignment statement. Thus, it would be legal to write $residents["220A"] = "Watson";. If $residents wasn't yet referring to anything, this would create an array. If the key 220A didn't already exist in the array, the key would be inserted with Watson as the associated value. And if there were already a value associated with 220A, that person would be evicted in favor of Watson.

In fact, PHP automatically constructs some built-in variables referring to arrays. The $_POST variable is one major example: When a browser sends a POST request to a PHP script, PHP sets $_POST to be an array whose keys correspond to the names of the input controls, and whose values are the values sent by the browser for each input control. In fact, we've been avoiding $_POST by using the import_request_variables function; this function conveniently creates variables corresponding to each array entry.

In our above example, the keys and values are both strings. But the keys and values can be of any type, and indeed they can mix types. In an example below using the explode function, we'll see an array where it happens that the keys are all integers, and the values are all strings.

13.2. Example

Arrays show up in several of PHP's library functions. One such is explode, which splits a string into several pieces. It takes two parameters: The first is a string describing what separates the pieces into which it is to be divided, and the second is the string that should be divided. The function returns an array, with the keys being the integers 0, 1, 2,…, with the first piece associated with 0, the second piece associated with 1, and so on.

For example, suppose we have a Web form where the user types a telephone number in the form 501-340-1300 and for some reason we want to extract the area code and exchange from the telephone number. The following PHP code accomplishes this.

$phone_parts = explode("-", $form_phone);
$area_code = $phone_parts[0];
$exchange = $phone_parts[1];

13.3. Array presence

Sometimes we'll want to determine whether an array has any value associated with a particular key. We can do this using isset. For example, if I have a PHP script that is supposed to be invoked from a form with a field named userid, and I want to verify that the PHP script was indeed sent a value for userid, I can write the following.

if(isset($_POST["userid"])) {
    echo "<html><head><title>Error</title></head><body>\n";
    echo "<h1>Error</h1><p>Sorry, you must enter your user ID.</p>\n";
    echo "</body></html>\n";
    exit;
}

(The above example also uses the PHP function exit, which terminates the execution of the current script. In this case, we wouldn't want it to continue because we have already sent the HTML response reporting the problem with the POST request.)

If for some reason you want to delete a key and its associated value from an array, you can use unset, as in unset($residents["221B"]);.

Both isset and unset can also be applied in contexts that have nothing to do with arrays. For example, if we were still using the import_request_variables function, then we could also have written if(isset($form_userid)) {… to see whether the browser has sent us any information from of the form's userid blank.

(Though they look like functions, technically isset and unset are part of the base PHP language rather than part of its function library. This is a technical detail, though. You are free to think of them as functions, if you like.)