different between echo and print

[kula]

Hi,

Can you explain what is different between echo and print ?

Many thanks

kula

[Duey]

nothing. just peronsal preference. echo has 4 letters print has 5 ^_

[hermzz]

you should also consider that there's also printf
that one i think only works as or with a if statement. i have used the other two (echo and print) randomnly and i havent had any problem so i havent cared to see what theyre used for.

also read:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.print.php

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.echo.php

and finally, http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.printf.php

[Norman_Graham]

This one confused me for a while, although Guru is right - it's just personal preference. I think there is one important difference, which is that you can use echo to call a function:

echo my_function($params);

I don't think you can use print for this. However, I'm not sure if echo is even necessary to call the function. I use it because that's what it says in my book and I'm just learning.

I personally use print for creating HTML tags - i.e. things you can't see in the browser - and echo for things that you can see in the browser. The distinction is rarely clean, but it helps me to keep things straight in my head.

Norman

[Twist]

Some people claim that echo() is a more streamlined function than print() but I have no idea if that is true. I use echo() because it is less to type but when I started I used print() because it was easier to understand when skimming through code.

Btw Norman you can call a function just by doing my_function(); if used with echo the echo should print out what (if anything) the function returns. Here is a quick example

function bob(){
$text = "bob";
return $text;
}

echo(bob());

browser output
bob

[ahundiak]

I just found this out myself a few days ago. Amazing what is in the manual.

print only takes one argument and displays it.

echo can take multiple arguments separated by commas.

echo 'Hey there ',
a_function_call(),
"Or something $else";

echo '<option>',
$content,
'</option>;

Note that you don't need to use the . operator to get one long string. I have not dug into the code but it seems reasonable that using commas instead of dots will improve performance a bit.