Re: Differences

On 10/3/12 9:57 PM, David McGlone wrote:

Absolutely. I also think I learned that return can also work like echo if the code is written correctly.

Echo and return are two completely different things in PHP. Echo is used for printing a value out in a document -- for instance, as follows, in the midst of a chunk of HTML: <table>

    <tr><td>Name:</td><td><?php echo $name; ?></td><tr>
    <tr><td>Email:</td><td><?php echo $email; ?></td></tr>

</table> In the above example, echo is being used to output the value specified in the variable $name or $email (which would have been previously set) It can also be used to print the return value of a function. Return, in and of itself, does not print anything; it is used to ascribe a particular value to an instance of a function. So for instance, if you have a function: function getEmail() { $name = 'johnsmith'; $email = $name . '@sample.com'; return $email; } then any called instance of the function getEmail() will, in a sense, have the value of the return statement (in a sense, the code inside the function runs and *returns* a value in place of itself). So $variable = getEmail(); //variable is now equal to 'johnsmith@sample.com' You could then echo this value, if you wanted to. echo getEmail(); //prints the value returned by getEmail()