If a word is a variable, then a sentence is an array. A paragraph is an array of sentences, a chapter is an array of paragraphs, a book is an array of chapters, and a library is an array of books. This would look, in php, like this:

  $library = array (
    'book1' => array (
      'chapter1' => array (
        'sentence1' => array (
          'word1' = "In",
          'word2' = "the",
          'word3' = "beginning",
        ),
      ),
    ),
  ); 

Therefor $library[‘book1’][‘chapter1’][‘sentence1’][‘word2’] is “the”. And $library[‘book1’][‘chapter1’][‘sentence1’] is equal to array ( ‘word1’ => “In”, ‘word2’ => “the”, ‘word3’ => “beginning”, );

And thats an array. Thus closes our discussion on arrays in PHP … huh? whats that? oh… you need more? Well sure there are a zillion uses for arrays, and learning to think in arrays often takes running into a situation where using anything else becomes less than viable. But for the sake of argument lets pretend we’re keeping simple track of deposits, withdrawals, and a balance. In this app every transaction invariably has a couple of pieces of information: Transaction date, Second Party, Amount, And a type (deposit or withdrawal).

array (
  'date'   => $$,
  'type'   => $$,
  'party'  => $$,
  'amount' => $$,
)

Our balance sheet is simply an array of those arrays

$sheet=array (
  '0' => array (
    'date' => 'monday',
    'type' => 'd',
    'party' => 'employer',
    'amount' => 1234.56,
  );
  '1' => array (
    'date' => 'tuesday',
    'type' => 'w',
    'party' => 'rent',
    'amount' => 500,
  );
  '2' => array (
    'date' => 'wednesday',
    'type' => 'w',
    'party' => 'computer store',
    'amount' => 712.59,
  );
);

This, while fictitious, should give a good example of how a multidimensional array works. We can get a balance with a very simple loop using php’s foreach() conrol structure.

$balance=0;
foreach ( $sheet as $transaction_id => $details ) {
  switch ( $details['type'] ) {
    case 'w':
      $balance=$balance - $details['amount'];
      break;
    case 'd':
      $balance=$balance + $details['amount'];
      break;
  }
  echo "[{$details['type']}]\t "
        ."{$details['party']}\t "
        ."Amount: {$details['amount']}\t "
        ."Balance: {$balance}
";
}

That is basically everything you need to know to start (of COURSE there’s more to learn) working with multidimensional arrays, except for one thing. When you’re faced with working with somebody else’s data structures you will need to get information about how they are laying out there arrays. The slow painful way of doing this is examining the code. The quick happy way us to use either var_dump() or print_r(). I prefer print_r for most jobs just remember to wrap the output of print_r in <pre></pre> tags if you’re doing this debugging in a browser… trust me. it’ll help a lot.