Which is faster in PHP, $array[] = $value or array_push($array, $value)?
I personally feel like $array[]
is cleaner to look at, and honestly splitting hairs over milliseconds is pretty irrelevant unless you plan on appending hundreds of thousands of strings to your array.
I ran this code:
$t = microtime(true);$array = array();for($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++) { $array[] = $i;}print microtime(true) - $t;print '<br>';$t = microtime(true);$array = array();for($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++) { array_push($array, $i);}print microtime(true) - $t;
The first method using $array[]
is almost 50% faster than the second one.
Some benchmark results:
Run 10.0054171085357666 // array_push0.0028800964355469 // array[]Run 20.0054559707641602 // array_push0.002892017364502 // array[]Run 30.0055501461029053 // array_push0.0028610229492188 // array[]
This shouldn't be surprising, as the PHP manual notes this:
If you use array_push() to add one element to the array it's better to use $array[] = because in that way there is no overhead of calling a function.
The way it is phrased I wouldn't be surprised if array_push
is more efficient when adding multiple values. Out of curiosity, I did some further testing, and even for a large amount of additions, individual $array[]
calls are faster than one big array_push
. Interesting.
The main use of array_push() is that you can push multiple values onto the end of the array.
It says in the documentation:
If you use array_push() to add one element to the array it's better to use $array[] = because in that way there is no overhead of calling a function.
From the PHP documentation for array_push
:
Note: If you use array_push() to add one element to the array it's better to use $array[] = because in that way there is no overhead of calling a function.