Things to Check in PHP (php.dzone.com)

Title makes it sound like security issues. But really it's just a list of 'improvements' you can make. Fun.

NO. If you are having performance problems then the first thing you need to do is to run a profiler against your code. If you're optimizing things because you think they might be slow, you're doing it wrong.

Not to mention how dense these suggestions are. Caching speeds things up? Really? Thank you for enlightening all of us.

A bonus tip: do not merge arrays if you're not absolutely positively sure they are truly associative. Consider:

    array_merge(array(CONST_1 => 'val1'), array(CONST_2 => 'val2'));

You'd expect the result to be

    array(CONST_1 => 'val1', CONST_2 => 'val2')

And you'd be wrong most of the time. If we have something like this:

    define('CONST_1', '1024');
    define('CONST_2', '65536');

The result of the above array_merge is:

    array(0 => 'val1', 1 => 'val2');

And that's because PHP doesn't care about the keys if they are numerical (note that I didn't say numbers; these were strings.)

Coming from PHP background first I didn't understand why I would need separate types for lists and dicts in Python. Now I think they are a godsend.

If I had the time I'd write 999 Things You Should Check in Your PHP Right Now. If this is the only language in your belt, please for your software's sake learn something else, widen your perspective.

  php > define('CONST_1', '1024');
  php > define('CONST_2', '65536');
  php > print_r((array(CONST_1 => 'val1') + array(CONST_2 => 'val2')));
  Array
  (
      [1024] => val1
      [65536] => val2
  )