Arrays in Java have a fixed size, so you can't "add something at the end" as you could do in PHP.

A bit similar to the PHP behaviour is this:

int[] addElement(int[] org, int added) {
    int[] result = Arrays.copyOf(org, org.length +1);
    result[org.length] = added;
    return result;
}

Then you can write:

x = new int[0];
x = addElement(x, 1);
x = addElement(x, 2);

System.out.println(Arrays.toString(x));

But this scheme is horribly inefficient for larger arrays, as it makes a copy of the whole array each time. (And it is in fact not completely equivalent to PHP, since your old arrays stays the same).

The PHP arrays are in fact quite the same as a Java HashMap with an added "max key", so it would know which key to use next, and a strange iteration order (and a strange equivalence relation between Integer keys and some Strings). But for simple indexed collections, better use a List in Java, like the other answerers proposed.

If you want to avoid using List because of the overhead of wrapping every int in an Integer, consider using reimplementations of collections for primitive types, which use arrays internally, but will not do a copy on every change, only when the internal array is full (just like ArrayList). (One quickly googled example is this IntList class.)

Guava contains methods creating such wrappers in Ints.asList, Longs.asList, etc.

Use a List<String>, such as an ArrayList<String>. It's dynamically growable, unlike arrays (see: Effective Java 2nd Edition, Item 25: Prefer lists to arrays).

import java.util.*;
//....

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
list.add("1");
list.add("2");
list.add("3");
System.out.println(list); // prints "[1, 2, 3]"

If you insist on using arrays, you can use java.util.Arrays.copyOf to allocate a bigger array to accomodate the additional element. This is really not the best solution, though.

static <T> T[] append(T[] arr, T element) {
    final int N = arr.length;
    arr = Arrays.copyOf(arr, N + 1);
    arr[N] = element;
    return arr;
}

String[] arr = { "1", "2", "3" };
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(arr)); // prints "[1, 2, 3]"
arr = append(arr, "4");
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(arr)); // prints "[1, 2, 3, 4]"

This is O(N) per append. ArrayList, on the other hand, has O(1) amortized cost per operation.

See also

• Java Tutorials/Arrays
  • An array is a container object that holds a fixed number of values of a single type. The length of an array is established when the array is created. After creation, its length is fixed.
• Java Tutorials/The List interface