Question

which of the following is more efficient?

1. Using a get function on a token (random), for example:

   http://www.example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory?value=random
$_GET['value']

2. Make the token part of the URL and parse it, for example:

   $url="http://www.example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory/random"
basename($url)

And actually, is basename more efficient than using explode or substr(strrchr())?

Answer 1

$_GET is obviously more efficient, since it doesn’t compute anything

Still, unless you plan on calling that a few thousand times in your script, it’s negligible so use whatever you feel works better.

$t = microtime(true);
for($i = 0; $i<1000; $i++) {
    $x = basename($url);
}
printf("%.3f\n", microtime(true) - $t);

0.010