I’ve been using PHP as one of my toolbox languages for a few years, and there are both benefits and drawbacks to it when compared to more formal OO languages like C# and Java. One of the distinct annoyances I have with PHP is the for loop, and it’s not the loop itself, it’s the arrays that the loop iterates over.

The arrays in PHP are great and highly versatile, but they also lack a length field. Many new PHP programmers simply seek out a PHP counting function (count or sizeof) and throw it into the loop.

The result is that this function is called on every iteration of the loop because the loop must re-evaluate the condition each time it runs (hopefully this is obvious). Fortunately, there is an often overlooked syntactical option to store the length in a variable for comparison that doesn’t require an extra line of code before the loop.

And that’s it. Extremely simple, but it’s just one of those things that many people don’t even realize until they see it done.