Is it a god awful idea to generate lots of nested arrays in PHP?

Question

I want to transform the 'values' array created by xml_parse_into_struct() into a bunch of nested arrays which I can walk recursively. This is for a very simple XML class which will hierarchically search the document like so:

$xml_data = "
<sometag>
    <someothertag>
        <somedata>foo</somedata>
    </someothertag>
    <someothertag>
        <somedata>bar</somedata>
    </someothertag>
</sometag>
<sometag>
    <someothertag>
        <somedata>baz</somedata>
    </someothertag>
</sometag>";

$parser = new Xml_Data($xml_data);
$somedata = $parser->find('sometag')->find('someothertag')->results();
// 0: "somedata"
//    "value": "foo"
// 1: "somedata"
//    "value": "bar"

// etc.

storing it in nested associative arrays would make it much easier to work with than keeping track of each opening and closing tag and what 'level' they occur at like xml_parse_into_struct outputs. But I wonder -- if the document gets pretty big, will this huge array be horrible? Should I just give up and traverse the stupid version of the array that PHP gives me?

Answer 1

Not sure about your exact requirement but I think you can use array_walk_recursive there.

Answer 2

Why not to use SimpleXML for that? The same nesting model, but objects instead of arrays.

Answer 3

For best effect you'd might wanna do

$xml['sometag'][0]['someothertag'][1]['somedata'][0] # bar

Where the array has two dimensions for each level. That is, pairs of tagname/tagindex values.

This is both scalable and readable.