What are the best practices for structuring the code to prevent duplicate entries in a PHP session and ensure efficient processing?

To prevent duplicate entries in a PHP session and ensure efficient processing, it is important to check if the entry already exists before adding it to the session. This can be done by storing unique identifiers for each entry and checking against them before insertion.

// Check if the entry already exists in the session
if(!in_array($newEntry, $_SESSION['entries'])){
    // If not, add the new entry to the session
    $_SESSION['entries'][] = $newEntry;
}