PHP - Array functions

PHP has a very comprehensive list of built-in functions to work with arrays. Please take into consideration that working with big and complicated arrays takes a lot of memory usage. You can recycle that memory just by destroying the array if you do not need it anymore.

Here are some simple examples of how you can use some of the array functions in the list below.

php<?php

$file_list = array(
	"index" 	=> "home_page.php",
	"article" 	=> "article_page.php",
	"about" 	=> "about_page.php",
	"contact" 	=> "contact_page.php"
);

/*
 * Loop through the array and print all the values
 */
if(is_array($file_list)){
	foreach($file_list as $file){ // iterate files
		echo $file . "<br />";
	}
}


/*
 * If about key exists inside our array, get his value
 */
$key = "about";
if(array_key_exists($key, $file_list) ){
	echo "This is the file that contains the about template: " .$file_list[$key];
}


/*
 * Join two arrays into one array and then count all his elements and print them.
 */
$image_list = array(
	"favicon" => "favicon.png",
	"header" => "header.png",
	"footer" => "footer.png"
);
$all_files = array_merge($file_list, $image_list);

echo "The new created array has ". count($all_files) ." items.<br />";

echo "<pre>";
print_r($all_files);  // print_r is a very usefull function used for debugging
echo "</pre>";
?>

Here is a very extensive list with some other useful functions to play around with arrays in PHP.