PHP: Fastest way to handle undefined array key

Question

in a very tight loop I need to access tenthousands of values in an array containing millions of elements. The key can be undefinied: In that case it shall be legal to return

Answer 1

The @ operator and the error_reporting methods will both be slower than using isset. With both of these methods, it modifies the error reporting setting for PHP, but PHP's error handler will still be called. The error handler will check against the error_reporting setting and exit without reporting anything, however this has still taken time.