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Counting Array Values with Efficiency
With an array containing various elements, it's often necessary to count the occurrences of a specific value. In this case, we seek to count the number of empty elements in an array.
Problem
Consider the following array:
$array = array('', '', 'other', '', 'other');
The challenge is to efficiently count the number of elements with an empty value. A naive approach using a loop and comparison exceeds 30 seconds for large arrays with hundreds of elements.
Efficient Solution
To enhance efficiency, we can leverage the array_count_values function. This function creates an associative array where the keys represent the array values and the corresponding values represent their respective counts.
function with($array) { $counts = array_count_values($array); return $counts['']; }
In the example array, '' represents the empty value. By accessing $counts[''], we directly obtain the count of empty elements, offering significant speed improvements compared to a loop-based approach.
Usage
To use this solution, simply call the with function, passing in the array to be inspected. For instance, with the given array:
$count = with($array); // $count will be 3
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