How Can I Efficiently Merge Two Arrays Alternately in PHP?

Alternating Flat Indexed Arrays Merge

When faced with the task of merging two arrays, often the result is a simple concatenation. However, in specific cases, such as the one presented here, an alternating merge is desired. To achieve this, a loop-based approach can be employed, where the values from the first array are placed into the resulting array, followed by the values from the second array. This process repeats until all values have been merged.

Native Implementation

While the loop-based approach is simple and effective, it lacks native support in PHP. Fortunately, there is a slightly more efficient way of achieving the same result:

$count = count($a1);
for ($i = 0; $i < $count; $i++) {
    $newArray[] = $a1[$i];
    $newArray[] = $b1[$i];
}

This revised implementation utilizes the pre-counted size of the array, eliminating the need for recounting in each iteration. Benchmarking reveals that this optimization yields a significant performance boost compared to the loop-based approach.

Performance Considerations

In scenarios where performance is crucial and arrays are merged frequently, the optimized implementation offers a noticeable advantage. The difference becomes more pronounced as the size of the arrays increases. It's worth noting that these optimizations may not be sufficient for all use cases, and additional techniques may need to be explored for even higher performance requirements.

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