How does "declare" works?

[Ralf_Jones]

My code:

function a(){
    echo 'a';
}

register_tick_function("a");

declare(ticks=2){
    echo "[begin]";
    foreach (array(1,2,3,4) as $i){
        echo "[$i]";
    }
    echo "[end]";
}

the result output:
[begin][1]a[2]a[3]a[4]aa[end]a

why not:
[begin][1]a[2][3]a[4][end]a

???

[mikell]

"A tick is an event that occurs for every N low-level statements executed by the parser within the declare block." ~http://us.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.declare.php

Thats all I got..to be honest, I have no idea how this function works...check this out. If you hit refresh on your browser a few times really fast, you get this output:

[begin][1]a[2]a[3]a[4]aa[end]a
[begin][1]aa[2]aa[3]aa[4]aaaa[end]aa
[begin][1]aaa[2]aaa[3]aaa[4]aaaaaa[end]aaa
[begin][1]aaaa[2]aaaa[3]aaaa[4]aaaaaaaa[end]aaaa
...etc

Then if you wait long enough or restart apache, it goes back to:
[begin][1]a[2]a[3]a[4]aa[end]a

I think the beginning or ending of a block has something to do with it but I'm not sure.

[bpat1434]

The ending block of the "declare" statement (i.e. the "}") causes the tick to fire as well.

Note that it's not every itteration of the code, just every Nth line. So for tick=2, once you get to the 4th item in the array, the "}" will cause it to throw another tick. Plus the ending "}" causes the tick again as well.

Change your code to this:

function a(){
    echo 'a';
}

$array = range(1,4);

declare(ticks=4){
    echo '[begin]';
	sleep(1);
    foreach ($array as $i)
        echo '['.$i.']';
    echo '[end]';
}

unregister_tick_function("a");

And this output comes out:

[begin][1][2]a[3][4][end]a

Weedpacket or NogDog would probably be able to give you a better reason....

[Ralf_Jones]

What's the "low-level statements "?
How to detect it?

[bpat1434]

I'm not really sure... never used declare and ticks before....