How Can I Efficiently Count Empty Elements in a Large Array?

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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