Echo or Print?

darknuke

What do you use, echo or print?

cosminb

echo 4 chars
print 5 chars

.... it's faster to type echo than print

Moonglobe

print: PERL
echo: good ol' shell scripting

need I say more?

laserlight

I usually dont need to print and have a boolean returned, so I use echo.

echo probably is marginally faster considering that.

jimson

printf.... never heard of it.
i am echo religion

benkillin

I use echo, it has one more syllable then print, but its 1 letter shorter... I also am pissed at qbasic, so I dont use print... 😃

Jedi_Legend

I use echo all of the time, but that's only because I don't need to return value that print() has. However, if I ever do I will use print. There is a difference.

http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/1/fid/40

Jedi_Legend

Originally posted by jimson
printf.... never heard of it.
i am echo religion

http://php.net/manual/en/function.printf.php

Fairly important function there for some people, however, sprintf() might be more useful for most. I use sprintf() for database queries now.

dalecosp

Echo, for the same reason I use 'short open' delimiter tags.... 😃

dalecosp

Originally posted by Moonglobe
print: PERL
echo: good ol' shell scripting

need I say more?

LOL, right; but, of course, PHP was originally just a Perl hack by Rasmus Lerdorf...

jimson

Jedi Legend
thank you for your link ... lol
no wonder weed says i speak incoherently ... 😉
weed.. u win

stolzyboy said i am yoda...
Jedi should knows Yoda... 🙂

jimson

about the short open tag.
method a : <?= $myVar ?>
method b : <?php echo $myVar?>

obviously, method "a" look fast and we type less.
but usually we will force to use method a or b when we try to mix HTML with PHP or PHP with HTML.
so, there is no content and presentation separation in our code.
basically, inefficient of code.

if content and presentation is separate, we won't need to use <?= $myVar?> or <?php echo $myVar?> just to escape other non-PHP code from parsed.
usually, there is only one start tag <?php and one end tag ?> in my script.

so how to achieve this. (if u want to know, if u don't want, nevermind)
1. don't put HTML inside PHP script.
2. echo '<table border="0">'.
'<tr>'.
"<td>$myVar</td>".
'</tr>'.
'</table>';
* this might be a way, but u should escape from have a coding style like this.
3. start one with <?php and end one with ?>, make sure u don't have more than one <?php ?> in your script

ahundiak

And can you explain how your style separates content from presentation?

dalecosp

Note that I'm not trying to answer Ahundiak's ?? to Jimson, just throwing in my two-pence...

Content is text and images, generally coded in HTML.

Presentation, these days, is coded in CSS --- and it's cool. No matter where in the file I put the text or image tags, as long as the CSS is set correctly and the div or id tags are around the content, it shows up in the right place. "position: absolute;" is about the coolest thing I've learned in the last coupla years --- besides PHP....

PHP is the logic... when something has to happen besides spewing 'content' in the same old manner, you use PHP (server side) or JS (client side)....

FWIW, I'm an old phart, without enough math, science, and logic to fill a teakettle; basically my larger scripts are long lists of functions, many of which just include HTML "content", followed by a short script that lays the logic out in the fewest lines possible...otherwise, PHP just sits in the HTML and "activates" the content, like it was intended to do....

jimson

well, i will explain my way a byte.

no HTML should be glued into PHP script like this

<table border="1">
<?php
for($i=0; $i<10; $i++) {
?>
<tr><td><?php echo $i?></td></td>
<?php
}
?>
</table>

data should be outside of PHP.
tats why xml exists, xslt and ... 🙂

ahundiak

Jimson.
I still don't get it. In one case you use only echo statements to output html. In the second case you put out html while switching to php to output variables.

How does outputting everything from inside of php tags separate content from presentation?

To me they look the same except that the second case is easier to read because you don't have to worry as much about quotes,double quotes and new lines.

dalecosp,

Content is text and images, generally coded in HTML.

I don't fully agree that content is generally encoded in HTML. To me at least the content is the text or image itself. It's when you want to present the content that you start to wrap it in html tags.

jimson

well ahundiak..
the first case and second case is the cases i wish to tell all, DON'T USE or DON't CODE LIKE TAT. they are bad practices usually people did.

did u notice the asterik
* this might be a way, but u should escape from have a coding style like this.

in my first case.
IMHO, the first case is better a bit compare to second.
maybe coz i didn't indent it and how it using [php.] tag

May GOD bless u , me, and all of us... 🙂

ahundiak

I guess I don't understand which style you think is best.

Is it option 3 from several posts ago?

3. start one with <?php and end one with ?>, make sure u don't have more than one <?php ?> in your script

If so, are you saying that php scripts should never output html? That only tools such as xslt should produce html?

laserlight

I don't fully agree that content is generally encoded in HTML. To me at least the content is the text or image itself.

I think he probably meant content in terms of PHP.

dalecosp

I suppose I didn't word that clearly enough. After looking at Ahundiak's post, I think he said it better. Perhaps I should have said "you can generally tell where the content lies because it is wrapped in HTML tags." which almost sounds like a direct quote of him....

<body> would be a major indicator, for example.... 🙂 And then, these days, as I mentioned earlier, there's <div> and <span> and such, that tell you that what's coming up is content that is being shaped up for presentation by a CSS file ... so, HTML is still just doing print house 'markup' --- AAMOF, it's a now the minimum-wage subordinate typesetter 'cuz it's boss "CSS" is telling it what to do in terms of layout...

As for the rest of this discussion, I'd just have to ask, 'what in the world?' PHP was made to output html, was it not? Based on some kind of logic to determine what HTML to output ... browsers read HTML; people wanted sites to interact, be somewhat 'intelligent'; so people began using Perl and then PHP to output HTML based on user actions or other conditions, like the date/time, current status of something else in the world, etc., ....