What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of using arrays to store and search through data in PHP?

Using arrays to store and search through data in PHP can offer benefits such as easy access to elements by index, flexibility in storing different types of data, and simple iteration over the elements. However, drawbacks include slower search times for large arrays compared to other data structures like hash tables, and the need to manually manage the ordering of elements.

// Example of storing data in an array and searching for a specific element
$data = array("apple", "banana", "orange", "grape");

// Search for "orange" in the array
$searchItem = "orange";
if (in_array($searchItem, $data)) {
    echo "$searchItem found in the array";
} else {
    echo "$searchItem not found in the array";
}