Programming PHP

As we discussed in Chapter 2, PHP supports both scalar and compound data types. In this chapter, we'll discuss one of the compound types: arrays. An array is a collection of data values, organized as an ordered collection of key-value pairs.

This chapter talks about creating an array, adding and removing elements from an array, and looping over the contents of an array. There are many built-in functions that work with arrays in PHP, because arrays are very common and useful. For example, if you want to send email to more than one email address, you'll store the email addresses in an array and then loop through the array, sending the message to the current email address. Also, if you have a form that permits multiple selections, the items the user selected are returned in an array.