PHP5 Performance improvement for wptexturize

[solarissmoke]

Now that we have ditched PHP4 we can do foreach() loops passing array elements by reference. Currently in wptexturize() we make a copy of each array element from $textarr and then write to a separate $output variable. In PHP5 this is unnecessary as we can work directly on the elements of $textarr.

I'm guessing this will need unit tests but it certainly should be more efficient.

Improved version.

Thanks for reporting this.

Reviewed, tested and benchmarked 16684.diff. Better performance compared to the original, looks good.

However there is more to improve as I could find out in benchmarks, even on shorter strings this is double to triple the improvement of 16684.diff.

16684.patch passes TestWPTexturize unit tests.

Quick microtime perfomance test

5000 runs with performance.php yields numbers like 10.505 seconds without the patch and 9.510 with.

(In [17636]) Performance improvements for wptexturize(). Props solarissmoke, hakre. fixes #16684