[RESOLVED] Optimal way to "echo"?

[BrightIdeas]

I've been wondering about this...
A lot of the pages I write have conditional sections. For example, if the person who logged in is an administrator of the site, the links to the administrative section of the site are displayed. If the visitor is not an administrator it display links to our best selling products. It's a simple if...else... statement.
Up until recently, I put everything in the if/else statement, including the html sections to be written to the page and I just escaped all the quote marks wherever needed.
Being fairly new at PHP, I recently discovered I don't have to write it all in php and echo out the html, I can end the php code, write the HTML and start another php section wherever the html ends.
Now I wonder... which way is best? What is more optimal? Or is the difference the same as the difference between "print" and "echo"?

Or is that just a can of worms I don't want to get into?

[Judgey]

I mainly use this method, it's no different to echoing out data...

[bradgrafelman]

Well, it is slightly different in that PHP doesn't do any parsing on the data and instead just passes it through as output.

However, the amount of CPU time saved in doing so is going to be negligible, so the "optimal" way to me would be the one that's easiest for you to read and understand when writing/editing the code.

[BrightIdeas]

Cool. Thanks for the quick responses. I was hoping CPU time difference would be negligible... I'd hate to have to go change that throughout my site.

Thanks!