Fastest way to represent a collection of bits in PHP?

What is a good way to represent a collection of bits?

I have a set of various on/off toggles (thousands of them) and need to store and retrieve their state. The naïve implementation would be an arra开发者_如何学Pythony of booleans, but I'm wondering if there's a better way (better in terms of access speed and/or memory requirements).

I've found this BitArray implementation, but it's limited to 32 bits, which is not enough for this case.

---

Another option is to store them in blocks of PHP_INT_SIZE*8 in integers and use bitwise operators to set/unset them.

I can't comment on speeds or memory consumption of this method, you may have to do some benchmarking.

---

You might want to have a look at the DataStructures in SPL. Depending on your UseCase, they might perform better than an array, e.g. use a FixedArray when you know the size of your collection, etc. For large datasets, this might make a difference.

Another idea would be to just concat the options into a single string of 1 and 0s. Since strings can be accessed as arrays, you could then do $options[31] to retrieve the bit at this position. All you'd need then, is a map of what position is which option.

Still, Yacoby's solution sounds the most feasible to me though.

---

GMP has bit functions, like http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.gmp-clrbit.php