Basic PHP Tutorial 12: Associative Array

hello and welcome to the 12th php tutorial in the last tutorial we left off with a very basic array where it was just you had different parts uh assigned to this variable and you could call a numerical number and receive you know that part which in this case was a string but it could be you know an integer or whatever so in this one we're going to talk about an associative array and the point of an associative array is so you can actually like instead of having it be this structured like this is zero this is one two three and so on you can actually define the um the key in the array and the key can be a numerical number or as if there's any other type of number or it can actually be string text so that sounds exciting let's get into it the definition to it is uh pretty much the same only let's call it uh something else we'll call it uh we'll call it cooler array and this time we're gonna define it now if you recall let's pop over yeah it's still here remember how it print r and it printed this out for us it said array and it gave all this stuff this is actually how you'll define your associative array because what it does is it actually prints out an associative array for you and so the way this looks is actually how you'll code your associative array you'll choose uh the stuff so instead of zero we can put anything we want in here let's just use an example of like you're a teacher and these are like students in their grades for example so what you can do with an associative array is later on reference it and use it like i was saying like earlier you use it much like a you would use a python dictionary you reference for a key in value you know a term and a definition so let's just say you're a teacher and you're going through this array or you're adding stuff into the array and you're going to say um jeff and jeff got a an 89 on his test then we have um or i'm sorry not a semicolon not a period either then we've got um sally sally got a 98 she was probably the smartest one in the class then we've got uh kevin kevin's a little bit of a dunce he got a 54. and um kelly got a 79. so there's our associative array now if you wanted to call a part of that array like we want to know um you know this list is really long i can't remember what what did kelly get i got way too many students so we just want to echo out uh what did oops echo cooler oh my goodness cool array and the variable we want to stuff in here is a kelly right we want to know about the kelly element so we want to echo out um the kelly elements value basically or really the kelly key what was her value so we'll come back over here we'll refresh and oh yeah that's right okay kelly got a 79. so that's cool um it's nice that you can use it kind of as like a way to categorize or to keep track of like single elements at a time be like okay who did this person get what did this person get what did this person get but what if you want to build like categories and put like maybe like per each element of the array you want even like war arrays like some arrays within a raise and i know someone's gonna comment and say it and uh you know what i'll just let someone go ahead and comment say hmm so i got a phone call i have no idea where i left off somewhere in there i was making fun of people that were gonna no doubt say a reception but um with that sorry guys i ruined it for you anyway um as always thanks for watching and stay tuned to the next video