Programming style question

[dabehr]

Does anybody know for performance purposes what the best way to write a program would be.

For example:

<?php

$hello = "Hello World";

echo "<center>";
echo "<font size=6>";
echo $hello;
echo "</font>";
echo "</center><br>";

?>

OR

<?php
$hello = "Hello World";
?>
<center>
<font size=6>
<?php echo $hello; ?>
</font>
</center>
<br>

Does it take more processing and power to coming in and out of PHP multiple times?

THANKS

~dabehr

[AceE]

yes, I believe so...the processor doesn't like reopening/closing...won't make a huge difference, but I hate it being reopened....

[AstroTeg]

I've seen an article or two that says PHP doesn't mind having multiple open/closed tags within a file. In the example you provided, both cases would take about the same amount of execution time.

Although my personal preference is to seperate the HTML from the PHP code so I've gotten into templating (the PHP and HTML both become easier to read and maintain). For tiny super quick projects I'll toss some HTML in with the PHP code - but I only have a tolerance for so much before I start using templates.

[dabehr]

The code I displayed was for example only. I'm thinking more about code with hundreds possibly thousands of lines of code.

[AstroTeg]

From my understanding, it won't matter much if you have 10 lines or 10,000 lines (only way to really find out is toss some microtime() statements in there and do some timing).

Although I would ask the question: If you have 1000+ lines of code, which one would you prefer to support. Me, I'd go with neither. They're both ugly. cough templates! cough 🙂