PHP faster using commas quick tip

In PHP you can concatenate with a comma instead of a period when using echo. Commas make you script faster.

example:

the fast:
echo $var . $var2;

the furious
echo $var, $var2;

I'm just curious as to why and how commas make the script faster. Could you please elaborate?

My guess is one combines them (the variables) and the other runs the command twice.

Close.

echo() can take one more more arguments to print. Using a comma simply passes more arguments to echo().

A dot causes the strings to first be concatenated, which is a fairly expensive operation, before being passed as a single argument to echo().

In either case, the function is still only called once.

Are there any (known) downside with the use of commas?

For instance could the output become different (than what I'm used to) when echoing with commas instead of dots?

It's possible, but the only time it's going to happen is pretty much when you're trying to break something.





Try changing the periods in the last line to commas, and see what happens to the output.

Thanks for explaining joebert. I don't fully understand that but its not because you explains in a hard to understand way.

But there is some code there that I have yet to play with and have little clue what it does (ob_get_contents()), ([appended]) and (ob_start()). I will look back at this when I have done some more research and hopefully by then I will understand your example better!

What that code is doing, is looking at the output buffer while generating the string that the class should return.

_toString is what's called a "magic method" in PHP classes. Basically, any time an instance of a class, for instance when it's passed to echo, needs to return a string for whatever reason, _toString is a method you can define in the class definition as a way to determine how your class will return a string.

For instance, if you have a class named "person" with two attributres, "first_name" and "last_name".



You could setup something like this to get a "person"'s full name.



Or, you could setup a _toString method, which PHP will know to call automatically in order to generate the string when you do something such as



For instance



Now realistically, chances are you're never going to have a class that looks at the output buffer before generating a string for output. The only time I could think it would even be reasonable (somewhat) is if you had a class that defined a part of the English language that looked at the previously printed output to see how it should print something.

For instance, if you had a keyword that could be singular or plural depending on what was printed before it, you could return whichever one would make more sense for the currently generated sentence. Now, in 7 years I've never seen anything like that done, the example I posted is actually the first time I've seen anything like this period. So, you're probably safe assuming it's almost never going to be something you need to worry about,

You know what, I think I got it now after some reading! Also I appreciate your well written code, it got me questioning my own code and realizing that I should use the word "public" instead of "var" when declaringpublic variable(s).