Weaving In/Out off PHP Question

Ulujain

Just curious to know from a performance or best practices viewpoint, is it better to include all non-PHP stuff within PHP as a print() or an echo or can I stop and start PHP at whim in any given page...

i.e

<?php stuff

echo "<HTML MARKUP">
echo "<STYLE some.css">
?>

Or
<?php stuff ?>
<HTML>
<STYLE some.css>
<?php more php stuff ?>

The reason I ask this is that a lot of code I see has HTML and CSS echo'd from within PHP and following any of it can be a nightmare due to all the concatenation and escaping.

Thanks in advance, and Merry Christmas!

cgraz

I'd suggest weaving in and out whenever possible instead of print()'ing and echo()'ing stuff when you could just close your PHP tag and not worry about parse errors. You'd avoid A LOT of parse errors by weaving in and out, but I still do echo and print within php just out of habit. For example in a while statement

while ($a_row=mysql_fetch_array($query)) {
   print "<tr>\n";
   print "<td width=200>" . $a_row["field1"] . "</td>\n";
   print "<td width=200>" . $a_row["field2"] . "</td>\n";
   print "</tr>\n";
}

The other way would be

<? 

while ($a_row=mysql_fetch_array($query)) {

?>


<tr>
<td width=200><? echo $a_row["field1"]; ?></td>
<td width=200><? echo $a_row["field2"]; ?></td>
</tr>

<?

}

?>

But since I'm used to printing within while statements (atleast most of the time), this way looks weird to me.

But if i'm writing a .php page, and i'm going to be putting html contents in it like <html> <head> <body> etc, I'd rather just weave in and out of PHP. I'm sure most people would, but it's just a matter or preference--whatever works best for you. I'm sure a lot of people who use one method still occasionally use the other.

Cgraz

yelvington

If you have long passages of text that include variables that need to be expanded, you have two options. One is to jump out of PHP and jump back in every time you want to expand a variable. The other is the "heredoc" syntax, which has the advantage of not making a mess of all of your quote marks.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php#language.types.string.syntax.heredoc