I’d Like you to Meet my associate. What are PHP Associative Arrays? If you’re familiar with other programming languages, an associative array is pretty much a dictionary. Instead of accessing the array by using an index value, you’ll access it by using a key. That key points to a value. Keys in PHP can be integers or strings. If you attempt to store a floating point number as a key, it will be cast to an integer. Boolean value true will be case to 1 and false will be cast to 0. We can access a regular array with the index value of the