Advanced array manipulation

Now we have finished dealing with the basics, we need to add much more to your knowledge of arrays. What we first need to do is to give you some ideas on how to make the arrays you create in your scripts more persistent, so we need to deal with storing and restoring them.

The reason why this is important is that arrays can be quite large, depending on the script you are creating. Dumping and reusing variables in scripts is easy since we can use the source to declare variables we stored in a file. Arrays make for more complicated work since they can contain multiple variables, and sometimes we even need to create them from another data source.

Getting ready

The thing with scripts is that they sometimes need to deal with a lot of data. In a lot of cases, we can use files to both store data in and load data from. There are, however, some cases where arrays—especially associative arrays—are a necessity for working with large amounts...