Question

I’ve around 80 instances of this class called Items and would like to efficiently search the objects by their ID or NAME.

<?php
class Item
{
    public $id;
    public $name;

   //methods
}
?>

I’m using PHP5.

Answer 1

Assuming no duplicate names or IDs:

$ids = array();
$names = array();
foreach ($items as $item) {
  $ids[$item->id] = $item;
  $names[$item->name] = $item;
}

If you have duplicates (of names; I imagine there are no duplicate IDs by definition) then you need to work out how to handle that. You could store all the duplicates under one key (so the value becomes an array of matches).

Or do you mean a more sophisticated search? If so, a simple variant might be to break up the item name into words and/or phrases and then index them accordingly into an array.