5 Tips for Improve Your PHP Programming

Source: Mashable

PHP Programming has a powerful segment of open source platforms through which web applications are build. World's most popular websites like Facebook and Yahoo have taken a part of PHP to build their API to double its performance. Facebook’s trust on PHP is so great that they’ve gone up to the level of created a tool called HipHop for PHP that converts PHP code into highly optimized C++, resulting in the ability of the Facebook API tier to double its performance while reducing CPU usage. Check out good tips to improve your programming skills.

5 Tips to Improve Your PHP Programming

1) Optimize the Loop:-

There are many ways we can define a loop in PHP. We have “for loop”, “foreach loop” and “while loop”. Using a “for loop” is better than “foreach” and “while” loops if the maximum loop is pre-calculated outside the “for loop”! What does it mean?

#Worst than foreach and while loopfor($m =0; $m < count($array);$m++){ echo 'This is bad practice, as the counting of array size within the loop.';}#Better than foreach and while loop$total = (int)count($array);for($n =0; $n < $total;$n++){ echo 'This is great, as we are counting the array size outside the loop.’;}

Basically is this. The above code snippet shows two different ways of writing a “for loop”. The first way includes the operation count into the loop while the second one pre-calculate the total number of loop outside it. The difference between these two is that the second doesn’t run count operation n times while the first one did. 

2) Drop Those Braces wherever applicable:-

If the condition is constrained to a single line, below code segment is better than the one following it with braces.

<?phpif ($n > 10) $n --;else $n ++;?> <?phpif ($n > 10){$n --;}else{$n ++;}?>

3) Use isset() Instead of strlen():-

This is actually a neat trick. Here is the example to check whether the string has more than 5 characters long:

<?phpif (isset($username[5])) {// The username is at least six characters long.}?>

In PHP strings are treated as arrays, each character in the string is an element within the array. By determining whether a particular element exists, you can determine whether the string is at least that many characters long. (Note that the first character is element 0, so $username[5] is the sixth character in $username.)

The reason this is slightly faster than strlen() is complicated. The simple explanation is that strlen() is a function, and isset() is a language construct. Generally speaking, calling a function is more expensive than using a language construct.

4) Know the Difference Between Comparison Operators:-

Let us take a look at the following practical example that demonstrates when a non-strict comparison can cause problems.

If you use strpos() to determine whether a substring exists within a string (it returns FALSE if the substring is not found), the results can be misleading:

<?php$authors = 'James & Ben';if (strpos($authors, 'James')) echo 'James is an author.';else echo 'James is not an author.';?>

Because the substring James occurs at the very beginning of James & Ben, strpos() correctly returns 0, indicating the first position in the string. Because the conditional statement treats this as a Boolean, it evaluates to FALSE, and the condition fails. In other words, it looks like James is not an author, but he is! This can be corrected with a strict comparison as below:

<?php
$authors = 'James & Ben';
if (strpos($authors, 'James') !== FALSE) echo 'James is an author.';
else echo 'James is not an author.';
?>

5) Absolute Path VS Relative Path:-

Absolute path which is also known as full path will be better compared to a relative path for PHP. Relative path might cause problem for the include and require operation in PHP, whereas absolute path doesn’t. Also using absolute path eliminate the need for the server to resolve the path for you. Simply to say, do you know where the file is located when you just look at a relative path or is it faster if you know the full path?

These tips will surely help you improve your programming skills. Do you want to learn PHP Programming. Click here

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