I just want to quickly store an array which I get from a remote API, so that i can mess around with it on a local host.
So:
You can use serialize to make it into a string to write to file, and the accompanying unserialize to return it to an array structure.
I'd suggest using a language independent structure though, such as JSON. This will allow you to load the files using different languages than PHP, in case there's a chance of that later. json_encode to store it and json_decode($str, true) to return it.