What is best (php optimization)

[jacinthe]

Which way of coding is best, the first with a lots of echo's or the second one without echo's but open and close all the time php bracket...

With echo's :

<?
if ($contact->state == "RUN)
{
echo "<option value='RUN' SELECTED>RUN</option>";
}
else
{
echo "<option value='RUN'>RUN</option>";
}
if ($contact->state == "STOP)
{
echo "<option value='STOP' SELECTED>STOP</option>";
}
else
{
echo "<option value='STOP'>STOP</option>";
}
if ($contact->state == "IDLE")
{
echo "<option value='IDLE' SELECTED>IDLE</option>";
}
else
{
echo "<option value='IDLE'>IDLE</option>";
}
?>

---

With php bracket's

<? if ($contact->state == "RUN) { ?>
<option value="RUN" SELECTED>RUN</option>
<? } else { ?>
<option value="RUN">RUN</option>
<? }
if ($contact->state == "STOP) { ?>
<option value="STOP" SELECTED>STOP</option>
<? } else { ?>
<option value="STOP">STOP</option>
<? }
if ($contact->state == "IDLE") { ?>
<option value="IDLE" SELECTED>IDLE</option>
<? } else { ?>
<option value="IDLE">IDLE</option>
<? } ?>

Thank you for your point of view,

Jacinthe

[Anon]

Depends on how you think, I guess. I personally perfer your first example. I view PHP as a programming language and HTML as the output of that language. So I start my pages with <?php and end them with ?> and anything that needs to be displayed get's either printed or echod out to the screen. I find that this is easier to debug and to read after I've coded it. And I don't ever have to worry about weather or not I'm in a PHP block or not since I always am.

I've seen other peoples code who use PHP as just another markup tag inside of there HTML. This may work for them, but when I come across pages coded like that I usually spend my time re-writing them so that they follow a codeing standard.

[jacinthe]

thanks 🙂

so, it is not affecting the performance of the page? it's not slower a way and faster the other way...

[Anon]

I've never seen any differenc in performance. People have argued that the HTML will just get sent to the screen and the PHP parts will get parsed and so doing it as tags will be faster, but that isn't quite true. Since the PHP engine parses the whole script it's not going to send HTML any faster than it'll send a print, or echo statement. But if it does it won't be anything that you can see.

Personally I think that the ease of debugging, and modifying the code would still be worth it even if my pages loaded a second slower.