[RESOLVED] good coding practice with vars in strings

steamPunk

I've just been looking at this code

foreach ($arr as $key => $value) {
   echo "Key: $key; Value: $value<br />\n";
}

and i noticed that the echo line has variables inside the string, whereas I probably would have done it the longer way :

echo "Key: ".$key."; Value: ".$value."<br />\n";

is it acceptable practice to put vars directly in the string like that ? It's certainly shorter but would i run any risks doing it like that ?

thanks

laserlight

is it acceptable practice to put vars directly in the string like that ? It's certainly shorter but would i run any risks doing it like that ?

It is perfectly fine. The only trade-off is that such variable interpolation is a little slower than concatenation or using multiple arguments to echo, but the speed difference is negligible anyway.

steamPunk

ok - thanks for your reply 🙂

NogDog

Note that variables are only interpolated within double-quoted strings (or heredoc strings), but not within single-quoted strings.

$foo = 'bar';
echo "$foo"; // outputs 'bar'
echo '$foo'; // outputs '$foo'