Tag Archives: Comparison of programming languages

It’s Not True that PHP Arrays are Copied by Value

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PHP, Arrays & Passing by Reference

Do you know that objects in PHP5 are passed by reference, while arrays and other scalar variables are passed by value? Yes, you know it, but it’s not exactly true. Let’s see some example and let’s try to answer few questions.

// depending on the machine but both lines return
// expectedly equal values: 331208
 
// 331208
echo memory_get_usage();
echo memory_get_usage();

These two lines of code, expectedly return the same value (in my case 331208), which shows us that because nothing happened in between them the memory usage isn’t growing. Let’s now put some code in between them.

echo memory_get_usage(); // 331616
$a = 10;
echo memory_get_usage(); // 331696

Continue reading It’s Not True that PHP Arrays are Copied by Value →

PHP: Arrays or Linked Lists?

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Arrays vs. Linked List

If we talk about arrays and linked lists we know the pros and cons about both of them. No matter which programming language we use arrays benefit from direct access to its items, while linked lists are more memory efficient for particular tasks.

Array & Linked List
Array & Linked List

The items of a linked list keep a reference to their successor, so we can easily walk through the entire list. However we don’t have direct access to its elements. Thus we can’t go directly to its middle element! Even more – in particular implementations of a linked list we don’t know its length. But in some cases linked lists are far more effective than arrays. For instance reversing an array of non-numeric values require constant additional memory, but also requires n/2 exchanges. The same taks using linked lists is not only performed in linear time, but doesn’t require any additional memory. The only thing we need to do is to reverse the links – no movement of values and the items remain at the same place in the memory.

Merging of two arrays often require more space (proportional of the space of the two arrays) or many exchanges in case we try to do it in place. The same task on linked lists is far more effective with only changing pointers and without moving the values. Continue reading PHP: Arrays or Linked Lists? →

Object Cloning and Passing by Reference in PHP

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In PHP everything’s a reference! I’ve heard it so many times in my practice. No, these words are too strong! Let’s see some examples.

Passing by reference in PHP can be tricky!
Some developers think that everything's passed by reference in PHP.

Passing Parameters by Reference

Clearly when we pass parameters to a function it’s not by reference. How to check this? Well, like this.

function f($param)
{
	$param++;
}
 
$a = 5;
f($a);
 
echo $a;

Now the value of $a equals 5. If it were passed by reference, it would be 6. With a little change of the code we can get it.

function f(&$param)
{
	$param++;
}
 
$a = 5;
f($a);
 
echo $a;

Now the variable’s value is 6.

So far, so good. Now what about copying objects?
Continue reading Object Cloning and Passing by Reference in PHP →

Thing to Know About PHP Arrays

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Consider the following case. We have an array with identical keys.

$arr = array(1 => 10, 1 => 11);

What happens when the interpreter reaches this line of code? This is not a syntax error and it is completely valid. Very similar, but more interesting case is when we have an array of identical keys, where those identical keys are represented once as an integer and then as a string.

Keys in PHP arrays are not type sensitive, so pay attention when using them!
Keys in PHP arrays are not type sensitive, so pay attention when using them!

$arr = array(1 => 10, "1" => 11);

Now several questions arise. First of all, how many elements have this array? Two or one. This can be easily verified by checking what count() will return. Continue reading Thing to Know About PHP Arrays →

PHP: What is More Powerful Than list() – Perhaps extract()

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list() in PHP

Recently I wrote about list() in PHP which is indeed very powerful when assigning variable values from array elements.

$a = array(10, array('here', 'are', 'some', 'tests'));
list($count, $list) = $a;

Actually my example in the post was not correct, because I wrote that you can pass an associative array, but the truth is that you cannot, and thus the array should be always with numeric keys. After noticing the comments of that post, and thanks to @Philip,  I searched a bit about how this problem can be overcome.

There is a Solution

As always PHP gives a perfect solution! You can see on the list() doc page that there is a function that may help you use an associative array.

Extract

extract() is perhaps less known than list(), but it does the right thing!

$a = array('count' => 10, 'list' => array('here', 'are', 'some', 'tests'));
extract($a);
 
echo $count;    // 10
print_r($list); // array('here'....

Note that now both $count and $list are defined.