Re: PHP String convention

Kim Madsen wrote:

Hi Nick Nick Cooper wrote on 2009-10-28 17:29:

Thank you for the quick replies. I thought method 2 must be faster because it doesn't have to search for variables in the string. So what is the advantages then of method 1 over 3, do the curly braces mean anything? 1) $string = "foo{$bar}"; 2) $string = 'foo'.$bar; 3) $string = "foo$bar"; I must admit reading method 1 is easier, but writing method 2 is quicker, is that the only purpose the curly braces serve?

Yes, you're right about that. 10 years ago I went to a seminar were Rasmus Lerforf was speaking and asked him exactly that question. The single qoutes are preferred and are way faster because it doesn´t have to parse the string, only the glued variables. Also we discussed that if you´re doing a bunch of HTML code it's considerably faster to do: <tr> <td><?= $data ?></td> </tr> Than print " \n\t<tr> \n\t\t<td>$data</td> \n\t</tr>"; or print ' <tr> <td>'.$data.'</td> </tr>'; I remember benchmark testing it afterwards back then and there was clearly a difference.

10 years is a long time... there have been benchmarks posted to this list in the past year or so indicating that in the PHP5 release there is no real difference in speed between the use of single or double quotes. If I recall correctly double quotes may even be eking out a small advantage over single quotes nowadays. Cheers, Rob. -- http://www.interjinn.com Application and Templating Framework for PHP