How to Store and Restore Arrays in PHP for Efficient Offline Access?

Storing and Restoring Arrays in PHP for Local Access

You have obtained an array from a remote API and wish to store it locally for offline manipulation. To achieve this, you can leverage JSON serialization without compromising performance or file size.

JSON Serialization: Encoding and Decoding

PHP offers two key functions for JSON serialization:

• json_encode converts an array into a human-readable JSON string.
• json_decode restores a JSON string back into an array.

Storing the Array:

To store the array, follow these steps:

<code class="php">$arr1 = ['a' => 1, 'b' => 2, 'c' => 3, 'd' => 4, 'e' => 5];
file_put_contents('array.json', json_encode($arr1));</code>

This will create a file named "array.json" containing the JSON representation of the array { "a": 1, "b": 2, "c": 3, "d": 4, "e": 5 }.

Restoring the Array:

To restore the array from the file, use this code:

<code class="php">$arr2 = json_decode(file_get_contents('array.json'), true);</code>

The true argument ensures the restored data is an associative array with string keys.

Custom Array Storage Functions:

You can create your own store_array and restore_array functions using the above concepts:

<code class="php">function store_array($arr, $file) {
    file_put_contents($file, json_encode($arr));
}

function restore_array($file) {
    return json_decode(file_get_contents($file), true);
}</code>

These functions provide a convenient interface for storing and retrieving arrays from files.

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