PHP Associative Arrays
A PHP associative array is an array that uses strings as its keys. An associative array can be created by enclosing a comma-separated list of key-value pairs in curly braces {}, or by using the array function.
Usage
Here's an example of creating an array using both methods:
// Bracketed associative array
$person = [
'name' => 'John',
'age' => 30,
'gender' => 'male'
];
// Using the array function
$person = array(
'name' => 'John',
'age' => 30,
'gender' => 'male'
);
Looping through an associative array
To loop through an associative array, you can use a foreach loop. Here's an example of how to loop through the $person array and print out each key and value:
foreach ($person as $key => $value) {
echo "$key: $value\n";
}
This will output:
name: John
age: 30
gender: male
You can also use a for loop with the array_keys and array_values functions to loop through the keys and values of an associative array, like this:
for ($i = 0; $i < count(array_keys($person)); $i++) {
echo array_keys($person)[$i] . ": " . array_values($person)[$i] . "\n";
}
This will output the same as the first method.