Who the f* cares if you already know about htmlspecialchars or not – it’s mere details compared to not having logic –

IMHO such a major lack of logic can lead to overly complex solutions to simple problems — here you’re only adding one check per loop (some made it double .. they beat you at it :p ) but in another case you will be designing an Mloc solution that runs like a tortoise where a Kloc solution running ok was possible.

The ability of a dev to synthesize and simplify is extremely important for extensibility and maintenance – and very often efficiency.

While from a web standpoint (and yes the future is going to be full of webapps – that need a real backend not in PHP though) it looks ridiculous that someone would not realize &gt was the culprit (see what I did there ) – it’s just webdev knowledge.

So yeah . might look like total fail but that doesn’t mean thing when you’re looking for a real coder and not just a php-drone.

Should the variable not be a numeric type, you’d require double conversions … all that to avoid a third variable when you’re obviously not thinking much further than 4 bit integers..

I would be surprised if creating a third variable in registers was slower than doing three basic arithmetic ops … – in a general case of course, not counting corner cases like register is exactly 100% full with a and b or something -

Performance of % and if statement is extremely relevant because there will be no IO for this exercise.