Is it better to store all what I want to echo in a string and then echo it or not?

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Hello,

working on a small PHP project, I've seen in the Internet that it's much better to store all I want to show in a string variable and then show it at once and not echoing all the parts little by little...

i.e. in case of a table with multiple rows, I should echo all the table at once and not echo row by row...

Is that right?

Or it is something an illuminated person thinks?

Currently I don't have a lot of registers to test it... and in my head it seems it's worse as I've got the array of data, storing everything in a string to show it later seems a memory hog to me...

What I have tried:

nothing it's a simple question of what is better,...

Posted 31-Aug-19 9:16am

Joan M

Updated 2-Sep-19 1:31am

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Richard MacCutchan 1-Sep-19 3:22am

If you want to display a table then you should use HTML, which has built in support for displaying data in such a format.

Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan 1-Sep-19 4:52am

Read the output line-by-line and generate an HTML table that can be rendered. Does that make sense?

Joan M 1-Sep-19 6:28am

Read my other comment please.

Joan M 1-Sep-19 4:52am

Of course! I've explained myself very badly...

I meant it is better to do:

echo(' my value ');
echo(' my value2 ');
echo(' my value3 ');
echo(' my value4 ');
...

or

$stringwithall .= ' my value ';
$stringwithall .= ' my value2 ';
$stringwithall .= ' my value3 ';
$stringwithall .= ' my value4 ';
...
echo($stringwithall);

I think the second method consumes more memory and gives no better results...

Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan 1-Sep-19 13:11pm

You do not need to do echo, just concatenate the string and print it once.

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Patrice T · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-02T01:31:00

Quote:
I've seen in the Internet that it's much better to store all I want to show in a string variable and then show it at once and not echoing all the parts little by little...

There is many aspects.
I don't see a point to build a very large string and echo it at once.
If I build a table, I would echo once per row.

Strings:
Strings directly a chink of continuous memory, this mean that every time you happen a little chunk of string to a bigger one, it involve a copy of both parts, the problem is that it degenerate very quickly.
Example: you must concatenate 100 little strings (same size), it will involve copying 5050 the size of a little string.

String builder:
This object is conceived to avoid endless copy of previous part of string, thus having a vastly better runtime.

Echo/write to file
is tailored to handle small chunks of writing, so it will not particularly worse than 1 single huge write.
The advantage of small chunks is to avoid huge memory hog.