Question

I need help moving through the large array returned by the Facebook PHP SDK. I am trying to find all posts from the user, then also check if the post does/doesn’t contain the ‘link’ key. I have read that it is inefficient to use the foreach loop on arrays of this size due to the copying of the 1MB+ of data to process it. How should I traverse through the information effectively?

The array is structured like this, where ‘x’ is the number of each post:

Array
(
    [data] => Array
        (
            [x] => Array
                (
                    [from] => Array
                        (
                            [name] => james
                        )

                    [message] => Thanks for the great interview! 
                    [link] => http://example.com/link.html
                    [description] => Description here
                    [etc] => Various other keys possible
                )
        )
)

Then my current code looks like this where $feed is the array from the Facebook API:

for ($x=0, $y=0; $x<=1000, $y<=19; $x++) {

    if (array_key_exists('james', $feed['data'][$x]['from']['name'])) {

        if (!array_key_exists('link', $feed['data'][$x])) {

            echo "<div>" . $feed['data'][$x]['message'] . "<hr>" . $feed['data'][$x]['description'] . "</div>";

            $y++;
        };

    };

};

I have read about the various iterators but I wouldn’t know which to use! Hope you can help me out, cheers, Joe

Answer 1

Speaking about foreach performance
and using array_key_exists in actual fact it’s a non sense
imho it’s far better like

foreach($feed['data'] as $post){
           if($post['from']['name']==='youruser'){
            //has user
           }
          if(isset($post['link'])){
            //has link
          }
}     

put it in the cillosis way
and it should be faster.