Derick Rethans has posted another article about Xdebug and some of the changes made in the most recent release, version 2.3. In his previous post he talked about the improvements to var_dump and in this one he shares updates to the xdebug_debug_zval handling.

xdebug_debug_zval() has been around for quite some time, to provide correct information about how PHP internally stores a variable. Unlike PHP's built in debug_zval_dump() function, it does not modify the variable information that it tries to show. This is because instead of passing in a variable, you pass in its name. Passing a variable into a function, can modify the various parameters that are associated with this variable, such as the is_ref and refcount fields.

He includes a bit of background about what the function is used for and then shows the difference it has in 2.3: the ability to handle nested data structures including property dereference support. He includes a few code examples showing the use of the function and the output it would generate for both an array and an object.

PHPBuilder.com has posted the seventh part of their "ABCs of PHP" series - a look at arrays and hashes.

An array is a list of a certain variable type, where each item in the list can be referenced by a unique index number, usually starting at 0. [...] Like any other variable type, PHP will automatically define a variable type and set it up for you when you start using it, however in most cases (and it's good practice) you should usually pre-declare your intention to use an array, especially if you don't know in advance what your going to be storing in it.

The article talks about what arrays are, how to create them, manipulating them with functions like array_splice and creating subarrays.