How a hash or mapping works in PHP - php

Question

In the language of Perl, I define a hash as a mapping between one thing and another or an essential list of elements. As stated in the documentation..
A hash is a basic data type. It uses keys to access its contents.
So basically a hash is close to an array. Their initializations even look very similar.
If I were to create a mapping in Perl, I could do something like below for comparing.
my %map = (
A => [qw(a b c d)],
B => [qw(c d f a)],
C => [qw(b d a e)],
);
my #keys = keys %map;
my %matches;
for my $k ( 1 .. #keys ) {
$matches{$_} |= 2**$k for #{$map{ $keys[$k-1] }};
}
for ( sort keys %matches ) {
my #found;
for my $k ( 1 .. #keys ) {
push #found, $keys[$k-1] if $matches{$_} & 2**$k;
}
print "$_ found in ", (#found? join(',', #found) : 0 ), "\n";
}
Output:
a found in A,C,B
b found in A,C
c found in A,B
d found in A,C,B
e found in C
f found in B
I would like to find out the best method of doing this for performance and efficiency in php

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, you are looking to apply your knowledge of Perl hashes to PHP. If I'm correct, then...
In PHP a "Perl hash" is generally called an "associative array", and PHP implements this as an array that happens to have keys as indexes and its values are just like a regular array. Check out the PHP Array docs for lots of examples about how PHP lets you work with arrays of this (and other) types.
The nice thing about PHP is it is very flexible as to how you can deal with arrays. You can define an array as having key-value pairs then treat it like a regular array and ignore the keys, and that works just fine. You can mix and match...it doesn't complain much.
Philosophically, a hash or map is just a way to keep discrete pieces of related information together. That's all most non-primitive data structures are, and PHP is not very opinionated about how you go about things; it has lots of built-in optimizations, and does a pretty solid job of doing these types of things efficiently.
To answer your questions related to your example:
1) As for simplicity (I think you mean) and maintainability, I don't think there's anything wrong with your use of an associative array. If a data set is in pairs, then key-value pairs is a natural way to express this type of data.
2) As for most efficient, as far as lines of code and script execution overhead goes...well, the use of such a mapping is a vanishingly small task for PHP. I don't think any other way of handling it would matter much, PHP can handle it by the thousands without complaint. Now if you could avoid the use of a regular expression, on the other hand...
3) You're using it, really. Don't over think it - in PHP this is just an "array", and that's it. It's a variable that holds an arbitrary amount of elements, and PHP handles multiple-dimensions or associativity pretty darn well. Well enough that it's almost never going to be the cause of any problem you have.
PHP will handle things like hash/maps behind the scenes very logically and efficiently, to the point that part of the whole point of the language is for you not to bother to try to think about such things. If you have relates pieces of data in chunks, use an array; if the pieces of data comes in pairs, use key-value pairs; if it comes by the dozen, use an "array of arrays" (a multidimensional array where some - or all - of it's elements are arrays).
PHP doesn't do anything stupid like create a massive overhead just because you wanted to use key-value pairs, and it has lots of built-in features like foreach $yourArray as $key => $value and the functions you used like array_keys() and array_values(). Feel free to use them - as core features they are generally pretty darn well optimized!

Answer 2

For what you are doing I would rather use sprintf:
$format = 'Hello %s how are you. Hey %s, hi %s!';
printf($format, 'foo', 'bar', 'baz');