David Otton has a handy little tip if you're looking for a cleaner way to deal with array data - casting it to an object.

Array notation is fine, but it can look a bit clunky when you're working with complex structures. [...] Casting the array to an object allows us to use object notation (->) and makes the code more readable.

He includes examples of the casting, showing the difference between the array and object notations including a method for creating an object based on a simple array that has basic properties built in. This sort of transformation can be useful if you want consistency through out the application - just passing objects with their properties rather than arrays.

Havard Eide looks at another aspect of the Standard PHP Library in a new blog post today - iterators.

[It's] a set of classes in the SPL that implements various iterating patterns: ArrayIterator, AppendIterator, FilterIterator, LimitIterator and NoRewindIterator. Hopefully you'll get a idea of what these are capable of and that you can get some new ideas for your day-to-day tasks.

He breaks it down into example of each, explaining what they can be used for, how they work and a code example of each in action (with output). You can find more information in iterators and their functions in the SPL section of the manual.

In this new post from Lars Strojny, there's a discussion of an "antipattern" - using the constructor for more than it was intended, the "verbose constructor".

Constructors are often used to shortcut dependency injection and parameter passing on instantiation. This is a valid practice and often leads to shorter code. [...] Instead of creating a new instance of "Money" and calling three setter, everything can be done compactly in the constructor. [...] So for the money object this works pretty well. The code is easy to read, but wait, the first argument can be grasped easily, the second too, but the third? It is not too obvious that it is a divisor is passed.

He compares three different ways to get the data into the class - the already-mentioned parameters in the constructor, passing an array into the constructor and using full getters/setters to push the data into the right places (with fluent interfaces even!).

Henrik continues his look at fluent arrays and strings in PHP with this second part of his series, adding JSON functionality into the mix.

Recently I've had the need to extend the interface further, among other things with JSON support. I've used code published by Nicolas Crovatti to do this.

His example shows how the script works to plot out some points for a table of stats. He follows this with an in-depth look at the different methods making up that fluent call (apply2Field, fill_ret, sum and plot). These make the array that can then be passed off to PHP, using json_encode to make an easy-consumable JSON message out of the results.

Eran Galperin has posted a few hacks you can use for the Zend Framework's Router system to make passing arrays easy and integrated.

A big advantage to using the front controller in the Zend Framework is the ability to create nicely formatted urls. [...] The implementation of the default router in the Zend Framework (Zend_Controller_Router_Rewrite) does not allow for passing arrays in this manner though, since previously set keys get overwritten if they are declared more than once. This is somewhere between semi-annoying to very annoying, so lets get straight to hacking it into submission.

His patch only changes one line in the Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Module component - changing it from assigning to a conditional checking for the existence of an array and setting it appropriately.

On the ProDevTips blog, Henrik has written up an extensive tutorial with plenty of code examples on working with something inspired by a few other languages - fluent arrays and strings.

I've been working some with jQuery and Ruby lately, as you might know they both have very neat fluent interfaces for writing short and easily understandable code. Especially Ruby's array and string handling should be something that can be done in PHP so I started googling. [...] It's probably very possible that what I'm looking for is already part of some PHP framework or such but I didn't want to spend more time looking than being productive.

Based on some Ruby examples, he defines a set of functions that can be use to create these fluent interfaces to the common PHP variable types (contained in a class for easy use). The entire source can be downloded here.

On the Debuggable blog, Nate Abele has posted a request for opinions on a topic that's been lighting up the PHP mailing lists (and other social media) lately - the alternative array syntax for PHP.

Well, there's a patch available, but 2/3 of the active PHP committers (who participated in the vote) voted against its inclusion. However, of the end-users participating in the discussion, 17 out of 20 voted in favor. Shortly before the voting was concluded, there was a call for some user-land input, so I decided to humbly submit my two pennies.

His comments support the idea, noting that arrays are "our bread and butter" for the language and should be updated to make them even easier to use (and more in line with the declarations of other variable types).

Brian Moon had a problem - one of his cron jobs was lasting for much longer (hours!) than it should have been. He tweaked, tested and debugged the script and finally came down to a call to in_array, something he comments on as being "quite slow".

See, this job is importing data from a huge XML file into MySQL. After it is done, we want to compare the data we just added/updated to the data in the table so we can deactivate any data we did not update. [...] We then compared the two arrays by looping one array and using in_array() to check if the value was in the second array. [...] So, that was running for hours with about 400k items. Our data did not contain the value as the key, but it could as the value was unique.

He method, replacing the in_array call that had to do a full array scan for each time through the loop with an isset/unset combo on the unique key, changed the execution time down from about 4 hours to 0.8 seconds.

There's been some talk floating around about a proposed additional syntax for creating arrays in PHP. Brian Moon sums it up nicely in a new post to his blog.

So, I was asked in IRC today about the proposed short array syntax for PHP. For those that don't know, I mean the same syntax that other languages (javascript, perl, python, ruby) all have. [...] It just feels like a good addition to the language. It is common among web languages and therefore users coming into PHP from other languages may find it more comfortable.

He compares it with other data type creation in PHP (you don't call int() to make an integer, so why call array() to make an array). However, according to a post from the internals mailing list, we might not be seeing this any time soon.

Harry Roberts has a quick post to his blog today showing a method he's come up with to handle PHP arrays from inside of SQL statements (a port of the JsonSQL library to PHP).

Trent Richardson created a very small and simple JsonSQL library for JavaScript which allows you to run an extremely limited subset of SQL against a Json array/object. I quickly ported it over to PHP 5 and it works like a charm, although the syntax for the WHERE clause isn't exactly the same but the rest ported across properly.

He's included some sample source code of it in action - selecting information out of an array of user information, once changing their order and the other grabbing a username. Complete source for the library is included too.