Question

Imagine a simple, but large array with keys 0 to 100000.

When doing a foreach loop of this array, is it possible to ‘seek’ ahead without doing something like:

foreach($array as $key=>$value){
    if($key<10000){
         continue;
    }
}

We do this kind of operation once in a while thru our codebase. It seams like a bit of a waste of ticks to go thru each of the keys until key is greater then 10000.

Is this possible in php 5.4?

Thanks.

Answer 1

it was possible even in PHP 2.0FI or ALTAIR BASIC

for($i=10000;$i < count($array);$i++){
}

No doubt some nitpickers will come to tell that doing count($array) 90000 times is a waste of ticks too.
However, to get a real performance gain one have to avoid lengthy loops at all.