strcmp or ===?

What's faster?

[Warboss Alex]

Hello, all.

For comparisons between strings, what's faster, the strcmp() function or the manual way (if ($x === $y) .. ) ..?

I've heard mostly that strcmp() is faster, just wanted confirmation from the experts here.. ;) ..

[coopster]

Not in my tests. strcmp is consistently slower, but not by much, about a tenth of a second -- except when the comparison values are numeric, then strcmp is consistently 3 times slower (probably because it has to convert the values to string representation first).

[DrDoc]

=== is usually faster
The reason for this being the fact that there are two checks:
1) Are the varibles of the same type? If so, fail immediately
2) Do the variables have the exact same values?

strcmp() first converts the variables to strings, then compares them.

Therefore, the two can be explained thus:

strcmp():
strval($x) == strval($y)

===:
gettype($x) == gettype($y) && $x == $y