3.0 Introduction

When I go to the grocery store, I go with a list of what I want to buy. A sample grocery list might be

- eggs

- milk

- turkey

- curry

In PHP, we would probably specify that grocery list as an array, or a list of scalars, with each element of the array containing an item on the grocery list:

 $grocery_array = array ("eggs", "milk", "turkey", "curry"); 

Then if I wanted to print out an element of that array, I would reference it by its number in the array. For example, the following would print out turkey :

 print $grocery_array[2]; 

Note

As with almost all programming languages, PHP arrays are indexed from 0 instead of 1. Therefore, an index of 2 refers to the third element of the array.

Arrays are one of the most powerful parts of the PHP language; they allow for the organization of related data, and quick access to that data. In this chapter and the next , we will discuss in depth how to efficiently manipulate arrays, as well as a few tricks of the trade.