Is there Java HashMap equivalent in PHP?

Question

I need PHP object similar to HashMap in Java, but I didn't find when I googled, so if someone knows how I can mimic HashMaps in PHP, help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Arrays in PHP can have Key Value structure.

Answer 2

Depending on what you want you might be interested in the SPL Object Storage class.

http://php.net/manual/en/class.splobjectstorage.php

It lets you use objects as keys, has an interface to count, get the hash and other goodies.

$s = new SplObjectStorage; $o1 = new stdClass; $o2 = new stdClass; $o2->foo = 'bar';  $s[$o1] = 'baz'; $s[$o2] = 'bingo';  echo $s[$o1]; // 'baz' echo $s[$o2]; // 'bingo' 

Answer 3

Create a Java like HashMap in PHP with O(1) read complexity.

Open a phpsh terminal:

php> $myhashmap = array();
php> $myhashmap['mykey1'] = 'myvalue1';
php> $myhashmap['mykey2'] = 'myvalue2';
php> echo $myhashmap['mykey2'];
myvalue2

The complexity of the $myhashmap['mykey2'] in this case appears to be constant time O(1), meaning that as the size of $myhasmap approaches infinity, the amount of time it takes to retrieve a value given a key stays the same.

Evidence the php array read is constant time:

Run this through the PHP interpreter:

php> for($x = 0; $x < 1000000000; $x++){
 ... $myhashmap[$x] = $x . " derp";
 ... }

The loop adds 1 billion key/values, it takes about 2 minutes to add them all to the hashmap which may exhaust your memory.

Then see how long it takes to do a lookup:

php> system('date +%N');echo "  " . $myhashmap[10333] . "  ";system('date +%N');
786946389  10333 derp  789008364

So how fast is the PHP array map lookup?

The 10333 is the key we looked up. 1 million nanoseconds == 1 millisecond. The amount of time it takes to get a value from a key is 2.06 million nanoseconds or about 2 milliseconds. About the same amount of time if the array were empty. This looks like constant time to me.