Piotr

What an author is trying to achieve is a slug-like url

this is great... but pretty useless :))

How about http://leaverou.github.com/prefixfree/ ?

If your hosting doesn't support customized *.ini files, you can always set this in script:

<?php
settimelimit(0);
?>

this code will result that executing a php script will have no time limit (default is 30 seconds)

Sorry, didn't spot the update at the bottom ;)

Why are you counting elements in an array before every iteration?
Shouldn't it be a better solution?

$elementscount = count($elements);
for($i = 0; $i < $elementscount; $i++) { }

I can be almost sure that now the results will be slightly different!