What are the potential drawbacks of using a character-by-character approach to numbering duplicate strings in PHP?

When using a character-by-character approach to numbering duplicate strings in PHP, potential drawbacks include increased complexity and potential performance issues, especially with longer strings. Instead, a more efficient approach would be to use PHP's built-in functions to compare and identify duplicate strings, such as array_count_values() or array_unique(). 

$strings = ["apple", "banana", "apple", "orange", "banana", "apple"];
$counts = array_count_values($strings);

foreach($strings as $key => $string){
    if($counts[$string] > 1){
        $strings[$key] .= "_" . ($counts[$string] - 1);
        $counts[$string]--;
    }
}

print_r($strings);

Keywords

string manipulation duplicate strings character comparison performance impact algorithm efficiency

Related Questions