PHP - *fast* serialize/unserialize?

Question

I have a PHP script that builds a binary search tree over a rather large CSV file (5MB+). This is nice and all, but it takes about 3 seconds to read/parse/index the file.

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Answer 1

var_export should be lots faster as PHP won't have to process the string at all:

// export the process CSV to export.php
$php_array = read_parse_and_index_csv($csv); // takes 3 seconds
$export = var_export($php_array, true);
file_put_contents('export.php', '');

Then include export.php when you need it:

include 'export.php';

Depending on your web server set up, you may have to chmod export.php to make it executable first.