"If" statements or Assoc Arrays?

Roscoe

I'm wondering what would be the best to use: "If"-statements or Associative Arrays. Let me give you an example:

$tralala = array(
"hopla" => array("a","b","c"),
"blahblah" => array("d","e","f"),
);

if($myvar == "hopla"){$the_array = array("a","b","c");}
if($myvar == "blahblah"){$the_array = array("d","e","f");}

The purpose is to pick just one keyword (hopla or blahblah) and then choose a random element from the array associated with it. The code I'm working on will likely have hundreds of these keywords, and I'm wondering if the "If-statement" approach might be faster (using a dbase like MySQL is sadly enough not an option). If not, would it improve if I used "elseif()" instead of "if()"?

Thanks!

Mordecai

If and elseifs would be faster, I believe. That way, the if is only gone through once--it only does the code if it makes a match, and doesn't declare hundreds of variables, only one.

ahundiak

Aswitch statement would probably be better than a bunch of if's

switch($myvar)
{
  case 'hopla' :
    the_array = array("a","b","c");
    break;
  case 'blahbla' :
    the_array = array("d","e","f");
    break;
}

This will probably be a bit faster than using an array of arrays but it's difficult to predict and probably won't be noticeable even for a few hundred entries. Use whichever you find easier to maintain.

Maybe $myvar could be a file name and each file would contain the data for one array.

Roscoe

I also thought that if statements would be faster than arrays, but I hadn't considered switch/case yet. And that looks even better 🙂

I'm currently using if-statements, spread over 26 pages (one for each character of the alphabet). But since I will have to repeat this 26-page scheme for different subjects in the future, and they will require frequent updates each, this is unmaintainable. However, a switch/case spread over 3 or 4 pages will be much better, and keep the number of cases to about 100 per page.

Thanks!