What is better?

scialom

Hi,

I am wondering for some time what is the easy way to right a script . Is it like this:
<?echo "<td>$i</td>";?>

or like this:
<td><?=$i?></td>

Any ideas?
Assaf

wilbur

Hi,

PHP script must be between <? and ?>, html script must not be between <? and ?>.

So if you would like to print $i out simply <td><? echo $i; ?></td>.

superwormy

Either of your examples is just fine.

Find a style and stick to it, and make sure its well documented and simple to understand for other people.

DeltaRho2K

Bingo, you gotta code consistently... (if for no other reason, so you can keep your own sanity) 😉

Either method works, but I would do them a bit different. (again, it's my style)

<? echo "<td>".$i."</td>"; ?> 
<td><? = $i; ?></td>

Sometimes you will find yourself writing your code to work best with the syntax highlighting of your development program. I know I do that, and so it is important to find a good program, learn how to use it, and stick with it...

ahundiak

One reason I like the
<td><?= $i ?></td>
style is that it's easier to produce html that's readable when using view source which in turn makes debugging scripts easier.

Something like:

<tr>
  <td>
    <?= $some_content ?>
  </td>
</tr>

Comes out readable when viewing the source. If you just echo it out then you either have to explicitly add new lines and spacing or you end up with long difficult to read unindented lines.

planetsim

As im starting to build more and more bigger Web Applications i try to keep HTML and PHP seperate. This way my site is more dynamic.

If i need to only edit the HTML i dont need to fix the PHP just to cater for the new HTML which is going in place, and finally PHP and HTML together in bigger Applications can get unreadable and very very messy.

But before i did that i would use this style

<?php echo "<td>".$i."</td>"; ?>

I guess its perference and the way you like your code to look

DeltaRho2K

Personally, I don't particularly care how my Source Code looks from the outside, and to be honest with you, I don't care what others think either... I think it would be a bit of a distraction, and people wouldn't want to look at it... That's fine by me 😉

I indent and comment the you-know-what out of my code, and I find my code is fairly readable (enough for me) to be able to adjust it later... Also, I haven't done enough "Big Apps" to worry about it yet, but I am worknig on a calendar app that is turning out to be pretty big, so I will take some what you (planetsim and ahundiak) ar e saying, into consideration...
Thanks for your input.

planetsim

Commenting should always be a big part of a script... Makes life so much easier if you look at a comment and look down a little and know exactly what the code is doing, instead of starting from top to bottom.