Random Findings as a Developer

Archive for May, 2010

Just because PHP allows you to do something, doesn’t mean that it is the best thing to do.  For example, PHP will automatically convert single word strings (non-quote/apostrophe delimited) into an actual string if required.

<?php
    $arr = array ();
 
    for ( $x = 0; $x < 1000000; $x++ )
    {
        $arr [ foo ] = 'bar';
    }
?>

In this case, PHP will automatically convert foo to the string ‘foo’. However, this up conversion doesn’t come without a cost. For example, when timing the use of this script, the following are the results:

$ time php test.php 

real    0m1.641s
user    0m1.424s
sys     0m0.044s

However, when running the following script and not forcing it to up convert, the results are extremely different.

<?php
    $arr = array ();
 
    for ( $x = 0; $x < 1000000; $x++ )
    {
        $arr [ 'foo' ] = 'bar';
    }
?>

In this case, the word ‘foo’ is already pre-defined as a string, so no up conversion is required. The time for this is as follows:

$ time php test.php 

real    0m0.467s
user    0m0.292s
sys     0m0.052s

As you can see, by including the quotes and telling PHP that it actually is a string, you can potentially reduce the execution time for your PHP scripts.

Keep this in mind when using the associative arrays in PHP.