Question

I know the more efficient way to have a loop over array is a foreach, or to store count in a variable to avoid to call it multiple times.
But I am curious if PHP have some kind of “caching” stuff like:

for ($i=0; $i<count($myarray); $i++) { /* ... */ }

Does it have something similar and I am missing it, or it does not have anything and you should code:

$count=count($myarray);
for ($i=0; $i<$count; $i++) { /* ... */ }

Answer 1

PHP does exactly what you tell it to. The length of the array may change inside the loop, so it may be on purpose that you’re calling count on each iteration. PHP doesn’t try to infer what you mean here, and neither should it. Therefore the standard way to do this is:

for ($i = 0, $length = count($myarray); $i < $length; $i++)