Will shuffling the order of PHP array affect the reference or address of the array?

No, shuffling the order of a PHP array does not affect element references or addresses because the elements and their keys remain unchanged. After shuffling, the contents of the array (elements and keys) remain unchanged, only the order of the keys changes.

Will PHP array shuffling affect the reference or address of the array?

In PHP, an array is an ordered map in which each element is associated with a unique key. When you shuffle an array using the shuffle() function, it does not change the elements in the array or their keys, only the order of the keys.

Code Example:

$array = ['foo', 'bar', 'baz'];

var_dump($array);  // 输出：array(3) { [0]=> string(3) "foo" [1]=> string(3) "bar" [2]=> string(3) "baz" }

shuffle($array);

var_dump($array);  // 输出：array(3) { [2]=> string(3) "foo" [1]=> string(3) "baz" [0]=> string(3) "bar" }

As you can see, the contents of the array (elements and keys) remain the same, but the order has been shuffled.

References and addresses remain unchanged

Disrupting the order of the array will not affect the reference or address of the elements. A reference is a variable that points to the value stored in another variable. The address is the physical location of the variable in memory. When you shuffle the array order, the references and addresses of the elements remain the same because they are associated with the elements themselves.

Practical case

By shuffling the order of the alphabet, randomly obtain a set of words from the array:

$words = ['apple', 'banana', 'cherry', 'dog', 'elephant', 'fish'];

shuffle($words);

// 获取前 3 个单词
$randomWords = array_slice($words, 0, 3);

echo implode(' ', $randomWords);  // 可能输出：fish elephant dog

Conclusion

Reordering an array in PHP does not change the elements or their keys, nor does it affect references or addresses. This makes it a handy tool for creating lists of elements in random order.

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