Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
If I want to use a PHP non-associative array like a dictionary and add a big key, how much memory will PHP allocate?
$myArray = Array();
$myArray[6000] = "string linked to ID 6000";
$myArray[7891] = "another key-value pair";
Will PHP also allocate memory for the unused keys 0-5999 and 6001-7890?
No, PHP doesn’t implement this like a C style array. Php arrays are associative containers, as the php article on arrays states.
Since order is preserved, the array will likely be some kind of binary search tree. If you’re unfamiliar with binary search trees I suggest picking up a good data structures book to learn more or check out this wikipedia article for a rundown. Your example above would yield a binary search tree with two nodes — one for data at key 6000, the other for key 7891.