Re: Re: concatenating with "." or ","

Thiago Melo de Paula wrote:

Hello Yeti! This is a very good question, because it shows that you're interested in get the max from your PHP codes. In my research about php optimization, I couldn't find any relevant article about this specific issue, but some sites tell us that using commas instead periods on echo constructor would be faster. I agree with that, because using the concatenation symbol, will cause PHP to take steps to process the concatenation. But I think (I never did any performances tests on this subject) that the gain would be irrelevant on a general site. Regards from Brazil. Thiago Melo de Paula On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 10:25 AM, Yeti <yeti@myhich.com> wrote:

So it is faster to output various strings using the "," instead of "."?

Sara Golemon (one of the PHP devs) once wrote an article which covers (amongst others) this: http://blog.libssh2.org/index.php?/archives/28-How-long-is-a-piece-of-string.html The bottom point: using a comma is slightly faster and uses slightly less memory (which may or not be significant, depending on the situation). Do note though, that the ORDER of execution is different when comparing echo a().b().c(); vs. echo a(),b(),c() !! (with concatenation it will first execute ALL functions, and THEN concatenate them together. With commas it will start left, execute, output, and then continue to the right.). If you directly send something to the output from within those functions, you'll notice it. If you only return a string from it, you won't. :) so: <?php function a() { echo 'a'; return 'a'; } function b() { echo 'b'; return 'b'; } echo a().b(); // will return: "abab" (function a called, outputs a. Return value stored. function b called, outputs b. Return value stored. The two return values are concatenated, and sent to output) echo "\n"; echo a(),b(); // will return "aabb" (function a called, outputs a. Return value is also immediately sent to output. function b called, outputs b. Return value is also immediately sent to output) I hope that clears it up a bit. - Tul