On the Leve.rs blog there's a recent post showing what they consider is the right way to work with arrays in PHP. It shows three things you can do to use PHP's own functionality to more correctly perform some common array operations.

More often than not, when PHP developers debug others’ code, the majority of each method is taken up by array manipulations. Spending this much time on array manipulations is a huge hassle when trying to understand any given method. In order to speed up the debugging process, it’s important to start writing array manipulations the correct way, first. Here are a few examples of code I have either written myself or had to fix in the past. It is time every PHP developer knows how to manipulate arrays properly!

Their three tips relate to:

• Merging Arrays
• Array Value Manipulation (with array_walk)
• Array Value Manipulation (append with the plus sign, "+")