About my old and bad PHP coding habits

single, double quotes and coding...

[tomda]

Hi everyone,

Yesterday, I spend some time reading the PHP Bag of Tricks... Now I am a bit confused about the way I used PHP.

1/ First of all, regarding the single and double quotes, I currently use this: echo "<div class='test'>";
that is double quotes for PHP and single quote for HTML (well, browsers are doing the job of changing single to double quotes). I know this is wrong, it should the other way. But what about the speed?

2/ All my HTML is echo using PHP. I know that my PHP should be independent from HTML. But what if, like me, your script has many switch and if statement which output different HTML? Am I the only one to use 100% PHP?

3/ Lastly, I like to assess the speed of my PHP. Nonetheless because my HTML and PHP are "mixed" together, looping 200 times my page would kill my browser and CPU!
Is there a way to loop without rendering 200 HTML pages?

Thanks

[Sathallrin]

In reply to 1:
Using the double quote allows you to render variables inside of the string. Such as:

echo "<div class='$myvar'>";

If you have no variables, you should use single quote as it does not try to look for variables:

echo '<div class="test">';

When I use variables in the string, I seperate the string myself.. I'm not sure which is faster, but it allows me to keep double quotes in the html without using backslashes. Like this:

echo '<div class="'.$myvar.'">';

You can use double quotes inside the html, but you would need to backslash them.

echo "<div class=\"$myvar\">";

In reply to 2:
Echoing everything is not bad, but if you have a large chunk of html that you want to select because of a switch or function you can use this syntax to avoid having to deal with quote problems.:

print <<<EOF
<div class="test">
Your HTML code is here
</div>
<div class="test">
<img src="test.gif" alt="" />
etc...
</div>
EOF;

[lobo235]

1. I use double quotes all around and I escape double quotes that are supposed to show up in the HTML like this:

echo "<div class=\"test\">";

I don't know if it's the fastest but I have gotten used to it.

2. Smarty is a very powerful template engine that you can use that helps separate HTML and PHP. It also allows you to do switch statements etc. Check it out at [smarty.php.net...]

3. You could use output buffering to clear the buffer after each page iteration. Just an idea.

[dmorison]

I know this is wrong, it should the other way. But what about the speed?

If you quote a string in single-quotes, PHP does not need to parse the string checking for variables, ergo using single quotes is faster.

Am I the only one to use 100% PHP?

By no means at all. I have only ever used 100% PHP, and i'm sure there are many, many others who write "pure" PHP as well.

PHP/HTML soup is just plain ugly.

[jatar_k]

>> PHP/HTML soup

my favourite ;)

check this thread out
Benchmarking PHP text output [webmasterworld.com]

[tomda]

Thanks for your advice and URL.
Some quotes for "Benchmarking PHP Output"

Accumulating all output to a variable and then echoing once is way faster. [...]
Therefore, you never lost much time by echoing, but you can by stepping in and out of PHP.

Happy to hear that I learned the correct way. However, I 'll have to start using single quotes in PHP...

[twist]

You should use pure php and set up caching. Once you get your caching worked out its mostly irrelevant how fast or slow your php code is.

[lobo235]

I use the Smarty templating engine which has built in caching abilities. It's extremely fast and efficient and it's free of course. It turns all your code into a "compiled" page of pure php. It "compiles" the page from your template and the php code that goes with it. Check it out, you'll never write pages the same again!

[supermanjnk]

Lately i've been finding it easier, and cleaner to exit out of php instead of echoing.

for instance

<? php code?>
<div class="whatever"><? echo $variable?></div>
<div class="something"><? echo $variable2?></div>
<? php code?>

this way you don't have to escape the characters or use the quotes.