PHP if/else without echo - php

Question

How do I replace echo with proper html codes? Since there will be hundreds of html codes, using echo doesn't make sense.
<?php
if ($this->item->catid == 9) {
echo "yes, it exists";
}
else {
echo "no, it don't exist";
}
?>
I'm new to PHP.

Answer 1

Do you mean, how can one cleanly output many lines of HTML conditionally without having to echo each individual line?
If that's the case, something like this would do the trick:
<?php
if ($this->item->catid == 9) {
?>
<!--- put all the raw output you like here --->
<?php
} else {
?>
<!--- put all the raw output you like here --->
<?php
}
?>
The "raw output" would be anything sent to the browser. HTML, JavaScript, etc. Even though it's outside of the server-side PHP tags, as far as the PHP processor is concerned it's still between the { ... } brackets. So it's only output as part of that conditional block.

Answer 2

There is two way to do it :
1) As suggested by David, by closing your php tags to write raw HTML.
<?php
if ($this->item->catid == 9) {
?>
// HTML goes here
<?php
}else{
?>
// HTML goes here
<?php
}
?>
But if you're planning to write a lot of text it might be a be hard to read your code in the end so you can use the following.
<?php
$htmlOutput = '';
if ($this->item->catid == 9) {
$htmlOutput .= "yes, it exists";
} else {
$htmlOutput .= "no, it doesn't exist";
}
?>
You create a variable that will contain all your HTML by appending a part of it everytime you need to so in the end you'll only need to print a single variable.