In a new post to his blog Brandon Savage takes a look at five different functions for working with arrays you can do some pretty cool things with:

Time and time again, I come across code that contains a variety of array-handling functions that too often duplicate the work that the PHP core team has done to develop built-in array functions. Since the built-in functions are inherently faster, trying to reimplement them in PHP will inevitably be a performance problem.

The five functions he covers are:

• array_key_exists
• usort
• array_pop
• aray_merge
• array_rand