foreach - array function

[Anon]

just a quick question regarding looping an array created by an array function:

i used to think this was really inefficient:

foreach(array_merge($list1,$list2,$list3) as $item) print $item;

or

foreach(array(1,2,3) as $item) print $item;

as opposed to:

$list = array_merge($list1,$list2,$list3);
foreach($list as $item) print $item;

or

$list = array(1,2,3);
foreach($list as $item) print $item;

-- i thought this because i was thinking array_merge() or array() or split() or any other function that returns an array was being called for each iteration of the loop, although now that i've thought about it that would be a horrible way to implement foreach, and i think the php developers are smarter than that.

i believe, in a foreach loop, a temporary hidden array is created before the first iteration. if that is the case, neither method would be significantly more effecient than the other.

thoughts?

[linus]

I dunno, but I still create the variable first, then use the variable in the loop, just to be safe. 🙂 I guess you could test this out. Make a script with a lot of loops like that, and time how long it takes to execute (compare microtime() at the start and microtime() at the end).