remove duplicate from string in PHP

Question

I am looking for the fastest way to remove duplicate values in a string separated by commas.

So my string looks like this;

$str = 'one,two,one,five,seven,bag,tea';

I can do it be exploding the string to values and then compare, but I think it will be slow. what about preg_replace() will it be faster? Any one did it using this function?

Answer 1

The shortest code would be:

$str = implode(',',array_unique(explode(',', $str)));

If it is the fastest... I don't know, it is probably faster then looping explicitly.

Reference: implode, array_unique, explode