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.