How are associative arrays implemented in PHP?

Question

Can someone explain how PHP implements associative arrays? What underlying data structure does PHP use? Does PHP hash the key and store it in some kind of hash map? I am curious because I was wondering what the performance of associative arrays where when inserting and searching for keys.

Answer 1

The highest voted answer link is broken and doesn't give that much explanation.

PHP is written in C and the underlying structure is just a C array. C arrays are just chunks of memory. The indexes in C arrays must be continuous, you can't have an index 0 and an index 1000 that comes after it. To make associative array keys work, before they are added to the C array, they are converted to proper C indices via a hash function.

For a full explanation, I found this link to be much more informative.

http://nikic.github.io/2012/03/28/Understanding-PHPs-internal-array-implementation.html