What are arrays, and how do they work?

 Arrays are a bit different from the rest of our variables arrays act, as key-value pairs, that essentially function as a set of variables. So this allows us to make a list of related items that we can reference. As one big variable, the benefit of organizing data this way is it’s easier to manage when we’re working with related values or complex data sets, like when retrieving information from a database array values can be Any of the data types that standard variables can be, and we can mix them, so we can have an array that includes strings only an array that includes integers only or an array that includes integers strings characters or anything else you can think of there are two types of arrays. You should know about indexable or is which use numbered

keys and associative arrays which use strings is Keys, you’ll learn how to define each of those
PHP later. But for now, let’s learn a little bit about how they work. As a concept indexable,
arrays are basically numbered lists each item in the array Or List has an index assigned to it. And that’s how you reference it items in an array are known as elements. But there’s a small catch the indexing starts at 0, not 1. So if we have an array called colors and we want the Element in the array. We’d ask for the zeroth element that is. We’d use the index 0. Let’s look at a color array. With three elements. This is an array of size 3. The index is here are numbered from 0 through to and here’s how you can visualize it.
We could say zero is red, one is blue and to is green. Understanding this concept is important because when you reference data in your arrays you might get the wrong data. If you’re trying to get the third element. For example, and you ask for the index 3 item, you’ll actually get an error saying, the index is out of range or the offset is out of range. The other type of array is an associative array. This is an actual key-value pair. It’ll allow you to turn your numbered index into a string so you can Define the index as a string and then reference the element that way. This makes keeping track of complex data a lot easier and it works especially well if you want to store more than just a list of items if you want. To associate two pieces of data, you can do that with an array. Here’s an example,
of the names of people and their hometowns, you could see that the numbered index Is replaced with names. So Joe is from Middletown, New York. Aaron is from West Chester Pennsylvania. Dave is from Eaton, PA. And Brian is from Grand, Rapids, Michigan. So now we can essentially ask the array, what is Aaron’s? Hometown. Now, one more note, before we get out of the abstract and start coding these arrays as mentioned earlier, array, elements can take on any supported data type in PHP. That includes a raised array of arrays is called a multi-dimensional array and these are especially common. When working with databases, you can have an entire table of data returned as an array where each row in the table is also an array but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s actually look at how to define arrays in PHP.