Question

I have a php method that creates an HTML table with data it retrieves from a property.
My biggest concern is the performance of my application because I deal with a large amount of data.

public function getHTML() {

    $phpObj =  json_decode($this->data); // array(object, object, object, ....);

    $table = "<table><tbody>\n";

    if (count($phpObj->query->results->row) > 0) {
        $row = $phpObj->query->results->row;

         foreach ($row as $value) {
            $table .= "<tr>\n";
            foreach ($value as $key => $val) { // concerned about loop inside loop
                $table .= "<td>" . $value->$key . "</td>"; 
            }
            $table .= "\n</tr>\n";
        }   

        $table .= "</tbody></table>";
        return $table;
    }
    else {
        return 'HTML table not created.';
    }       
}

Is there a more efficient way of traversing through the array and objects without creating a loop inside a loop?

Answer 1

Don’t concatenate and return the value, echo it immediately instead. Less clean but the performance will be much more interesting since the strings are immediately outputed to the output buffer which is managed more efficiently.

A loop inside a loop is often the best way to traverse a two-dimensional array.