Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL® and Apache All in One

Creating Arrays

You can create an array using either the array() function or the array operator []. The array() function is usually used when you want to create a new array and populate it with more than one element at the same time. The array operator is used when you want to create a new array with just one element (for now), or when you want to add to an existing element.

The following code snippet shows how to create an array called $rainbow, containing all its various colors:

$rainbow = array("red", "orange", "yellow", "green", "blue", "indigo", "violet");

The following snippet shows the same array being created incrementally using the array operator:

 $rainbow[] = "red"; $rainbow[] = "orange"; $rainbow[] = "yellow"; $rainbow[] = "green"; ...