Question

I Have an array holding multiple objects. Is it posible to check if a value exists in any one of the objects e.g. id->27 without looping? In a similar fashion to PHP’s in_array() function. Thanks.

> array(10)[0]=>Object #673 
                     ["id"]=>25 
                     ["name"]=>spiderman   
           [1]=>Object #674
                     ["id"]=>26
                     ["name"]=>superman   
           [2]=>Object #675
                     ["id"]=>27
                     ["name"]=>superman 
           ....... 
           .......
           .........

Answer 1

No. If you often need quick direct lookup of values, you need to use array keys for them, which are lightning fast to lookup. For example:

// prepare once
$indexed = array();
foreach ($array as $object) {
    $indexed[$object->id] = $object;
}

// lookup often
if (isset($indexed[42])) {
    // object with id 42 exists...
}

If you need to lookup objects by different keys, so you can’t really index them by one specific key, you need to look into different search strategies like binary searches.