For loop behavior in PHP

I always asked myself how often a function gets evaluated if you place it in the break condition of a for loop (or a for-each loop). Unfortunately I have always been too lazy to look for an answer – until today.

Let’s have a look at an implementation in PHP:

<?php

function times() {
  echo "evaluation\n"; // report evaluation
  return 5;
}

echo "# for loop:\n\n";

for ($i = 0; $i < times(); $i++) {
  echo $i . "\n";
}

function set() {
  echo "evaluation\n"; // report evaluation
  return array(0, 1, 2, 3, 4);
}

echo "\n# for-each loop:\n\n";

foreach (set() as $i) {
  echo $i . "\n";
}

This will print

# for loop:

evaluation
0
evaluation
1
evaluation
2
evaluation
3
evaluation
4
evaluation

# for-each loop:

evaluation
0
1
2
3
4

As we can see, PHP evaluates the break condition of a for loop at each iteration, whereas in a foreach loop, the set of values over which the loop iterates, only gets evaluated once.

So, if you use a function with an expensive calculation as a break condition in a for loop, just store that value in a temporary variable. E.g.:

<?php

for ($i = 0, $times = times(); $i < $times; $i++) {
  // ...
}