Brion Vibber wrote:

Quick hacky benchmark: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PHP_string_looping

Executive summary: using the append operator ($result .= "*") is relatively speedy. Copying strings ($result = $result . "*") is really reaaaaally slow.

'Relatively speedy' is tempered by the general sluggishness of PHP; per-iteration loop overhead is itself larger than an append operation.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Hello brion

Can you benchmark the following code against the two aboves ?

while (something) { $result[$i] = '*'; $i++; } $newresult = implode('', $result);

Maybe even : $result = (string) implode('', $result);