3 Types of Arrays in PHP

There are 3 types of arrays in PHP.

• Indexed arrays
• Associative arrays
• Multidimensional arrays

Indexed arrays

These are the arrays with a numeric index and there are 2 ways to create this type of arrays.

Automatic Indexing:

$hobbies= array("Reading", "Sports", "Guitar");

Or Manual Indexing:

$hobbies[0] = "Reading";
$hobbies[0] =  "Sports";
$hobbies[0] = "Guitar";

Take a look at the example in the DEMO link given at the end of this article.

Associative Arrays

This type of arrays use named keys assigned to them by us and there are 2 ways to create this type of arrays same as the indexed arrays.

$age = array("Yogi"=>"28", "Hulk"=>"56", "Captain"=>"34");

OR

$age['Yogi'] = "28";
$age['Hulk'] = "56";
$age['Captain'] = "34";

Multidimensional Arrays

Multidimensional Arrays contain one or more arrays inside.

Lets take a look at the example:

Let's say we have a table like this:

We can store the data above in the 2 dimensional array like this:

$water = array
  (
  array("Members Mark",22,18),
  array("Dasani",15,13),
  array("Bubly",5,2),
  array("Aqua",17,15)
  );

And we can get the values from the array like this:

echo "We have ". $water[0][0]. " water " .$water[0][1]. " in stock and we have sold " . " ".$water[0][2]." bottles today.<br>";

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