In my previous article on PHP arrays I suggested a number of things that are tables and therefore can also be expressed as arrays. In this article I'll use a pack of playing cards to explore some of the built-in array functions most often needed by PHP programmers. To highlight some of the array-handling functions PHP offers, I'll be using some components of Buraco - a game very popular in my part of the world and quite similar to Rummy.

In the example he represents a deck of cards with an array of values like "A", "03" and "13". This array is then looped to make the full set of 52 cards and shuffled to deal a "hand". Array functions put to use include array_rand, in_array and sort.