What HTML is
An HTML table is a table element containing thead and tbody, with th cells for headers and td cells for data.
Web pages, email templates and anything pasted into a CMS.
What PHP Array is
A PHP array literal: an outer array of rows, each an associative array keyed by column name.
PHP applications that need a lookup table in code rather than in a database.
What changes when you convert HTML to PHP Array
The first table in the markup is used. Cell contents are stripped of inline tags and entities are decoded, so <td><b>Total</b> </td> arrives as Total. Nested tables inside a cell are not descended into.
Values are single-quoted with backslashes and quotes escaped, so the output can be pasted into a file as is.
What carries over from HTML to PHP Array
HTML records 2 things about a table that PHP has no way to hold.
PHP wants a type for each column, and HTML does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
PHP has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.
Anything visual in the HTML - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in PHP and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the PHP Array as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a PHP Array file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the PHP Array.