I am populating an array with strings that may contain duplicates. It's a large array.
Is it better I store each string as the key of the array itself, thus handling duplicates automatically
e.g. array['test'] = true
Or is it more efficient to store them all in the array as
e.g. array[] = 'test';
and then do an array_unique?
If you store each string as the key of the array itself it will take N time for each element to be inserted for an execution time of O(N).
If you do it with the traditional insert and then check with array_unique it would be > O(N).
Essentially it would take more time for the second method because you would be iterating the array multiple times instead of once.