Book Image

PHP 7 Data Structures and Algorithms

By : Mizanur Rahman
5 (1)
Book Image

PHP 7 Data Structures and Algorithms

5 (1)
By: Mizanur Rahman

Overview of this book

PHP has always been the the go-to language for web based application development, but there are materials and resources you can refer to to see how it works. Data structures and algorithms help you to code and execute them effectively, cutting down on processing time significantly. If you want to explore data structures and algorithms in a practical way with real-life projects, then this book is for you. The book begins by introducing you to data structures and algorithms and how to solve a problem from beginning to end using them. Once you are well aware of the basics, it covers the core aspects like arrays, listed lists, stacks and queues. It will take you through several methods of finding efficient algorithms and show you which ones you should implement in each scenario. In addition to this, you will explore the possibilities of functional data structures using PHP and go through advanced algorithms and graphs as well as dynamic programming. By the end, you will be confident enough to tackle both basic and advanced data structures, understand how they work, and know when to use them in your day-to-day work
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Using SplHeap, SplMaxHeap, and SplMinHeap

If we do not want to implement our own Heap implementations, we can use the built-in heap classes from the Standard PHP Library - SPL. SPL has three different implementations for the heap. One for generic Heap, which is SplHeap, for MaxHeap we have SplMaxHeap, and for MinHeap we have SplMinHeap. It is important to know that SPL classes are not considered as very performant while running on PHP 7. So we are not going to explore in details about them here. We will just focus on a sample example here so that if we are using any other version than PHP 7, we can use those built-in classes. Let us try an example using SplMaxHeap:

$numbers = [37, 44, 34, 65, 26, 86, 143, 129, 9]; 

$heap = new SplMaxHeap;

foreach ($numbers as $number) {
$heap->insert($number);
}

while (!$heap->isEmpty()) {
echo $heap->extract() . "\t&quot...