echo() vs. print()

anoland

I'd like to find out what are the differences between echo and print. Which is parsed faster? I hear Tim Perdue talking all the time about the difference in speed but haven't seen anything documenting that assertion. How are quotes handled? Does print handle quotes and magic_quotes differently than echo does? What is perfered stylisticly? Are they truly synonmus?

planetsim

echo and print. There's really nothing to say really. They do mainly the same job. Although Print i think can only handle one var. I cant remember though cos i dont use print anymore unless its nessacary. If you read the manual on the 2. They can do different things. But they still can display text

anoland

OK, thanks.
How about the difference between this:

print "<form>";
print "<textarea></textarea>";
print "</form>";

and this?

?>
<form>
<textarea></textarea>
</form>
<?PHP

In other words, switching between PHP and HTML vs. having PHP print() html. I know there is lots of ancedotal evidence that ASP has a perfomance hit when doing this. Does PHP?

Elizabeth

IMHO I don't think there is any discernible difference between the two, as far as performance time goes. This has been my personal experience, though- I'd be interested to see if anyone else has had a different experience.

-Elizabeth

Rohan_Hill

Unless you had a huge amount of traffic coming to your site, or the script had to repeat a huge number of times, the difference would be so small it's not worth worrying about.

planetsim

Actually ive seen many posts some here and some at a forum called Tutorial Forums.

Most end up saying that print is for something while echo is for others.

If you read the manual more on the two i think there is a comparison from one of the users comments