Are there tuples in PHP?

Question

I know in Python and other languages we have access to tuples to better facilitate, semantically or otherwise, the structuring of data.

My question is: Does PHP have tuples?

If not, what is the nearest facility?

Answer 1

PHP's only real built in data structure that people use for everything is the array.

Arrays in PHP are all hash tables and can have either numeric or string indexes and can contain anything (usually more arrays).

There are a few array constructs that work like tuples.

See

http://us1.php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php

http://us1.php.net/list

List is very convenient for returning multiple values from a function.

Answer 2

Arrays in PHP can be used very much like a tuple:

// one dimensional mixed data $x = [1, 2, "hello"];  // multidimensional third element $y = [1, 2, [3, 4, 5]];  // assigning to variables (list unpacking) list($a, $b, $c) = $x; //$a is 1, $b is 2, $c is "hello" 

As of PHP 7.1 you can also unpack like this:

[$a, $b, $c] = $x;