String construction

Is there any appreciable performance different between: a) $new_string = 'literal "' . $variable . '" literal'; ... and ... b) $new_string = sprintf('literal "%s" literal', $variable); I find the second method far more readable when looking at a complex concatenation, but I'm curious whether it's much slower or more resource intensive than the (perceivably) simpler dot concatenation. -- Jon Parise (jon@csh.rit.edu) . Rochester Inst. of Technology http://www.csh.rit.edu/~jon/ : Computer Science House Member