What potential pitfalls should be considered when working with multidimensional arrays in PHP?

One potential pitfall when working with multidimensional arrays in PHP is accidentally overwriting values due to nested loops or incorrect array key assignments. To avoid this, it's important to carefully track the keys and indexes being used in each loop iteration to ensure data integrity. 

// Example of avoiding overwriting values in a multidimensional array
$multiArray = array(
    array('a', 'b', 'c'),
    array('d', 'e', 'f'),
    array('g', 'h', 'i')
);

foreach ($multiArray as $key => $innerArray) {
    foreach ($innerArray as $innerKey => $value) {
        // Use distinct keys for each dimension to prevent overwriting
        $multiArray[$key][$innerKey] = 'new_value';
    }
}

Keywords

nested arrays array functions memory consumption indexing data structure

Related Questions