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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T04:08:08+00:00

I’m doing a check in a loop to see if a string equals another

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I’m doing a check in a loop to see if a string equals another string. Easy stuff.

However, it seems that I keep adding to the strings to check against, and have like ten different strings I’m checking against with each loop through. It’s easier code wise to just create an array of the strings to check against, and then do in_array();, but I was wondering which would parse faster and use less system resources?

Array

$hideme  = array(".", "..", "Thumb.db", "index.php", "icons", "index_backup.php",
     "style.css", "highlighter.css", "highlighter.js", "users");
if (!in_array($sub, $hideme)) {

String != String

if ($sub != "." && $sub != ".." ...etc

The difference is probably negligible, just curious for future reference.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The build-in function are always faster, as they are compiled C code. The PHP code must be interpreted.

    If you really care about CPU cycles, isset() is fastest, so setting the possible values as array keys will be fastest way. Of course, there is CPU vs memory usage, so which use less system resources depends on which resources you want to save.

    As @Kendall Frey stated, this is micro-optimization, so keep code readable and don’t do anything about optimization, unless profiler shows that this code has large impact on the execution.

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