What I keep seeing is something like
<?php $page_title = ""; ?>
<?php include_once("inc/header.php"); /* Include Header */ ?>
versus
<?php
$page_title = "";
include_once("inc/header.php"); /* Include Header */
?>
I assume there is no difference in functionality (not sure however), but which way is more semantic / correct does it matter if you declare all your PHP in several PHP blocks or a single one? Is performance affected in any way?
This is a major reason why doing your PHP inline is going out of style. There's no performance hit that I know of. All <?php ?> does is tell the interpreter that this is to be processed by PHP so your first code block is saying
Stop parsing PHP
Start Parsing PHP
I would imagine there's some miniscule hit somewhere if you're trying to wring every last ounce of efficiency out but I consider it to be insignificant. It's important to userstand that if you're using opcode cache (and you should) then the only hit is on the parsing side. Repeated execution of cache will have 0 effect here.
Readability, however, really does demand your code be as compact as possible. Remember, someone may come behind you and work on this code. Having two blocks where only one is needed is inefficient.
There is no real answer to this.
Some people like to have it the "Code-Block"-Way and put it all in one set of tags, some other people prefer the "HTML-Tag"-Way where they put each command in a new set of tags
There is no difference in functionality except for the fact that everything between one ?> and the next <?php gets echo'ed (So you have a lot of spaces in your output HTML, which is okay, since they are ignored)
Performance might be affected, but in numbers you really don't need to care about.
Generally, if you are in templates (or lets say, PHTML, HTML and PHP mixed), try to keep all commands single-lined (Put all single commands in <?php ?> and on own lines), this will make it more readable between all those HTML tags.
If you don't have HTML in your PHP file, there is no reason to enclose all commands with PHP tags
Related
I am a front end guy who is getting more and more into scripting and that being the case, I like my regurgitated markup to kind of look nice.
I ran a loop over some database values for a list and while most sites would just show a big old concatenated slew of <LI> tags back to back, I kind of like them \r\n distanced with proper \t tabbing. Weird thing is, the first list member renders like LI> rather than <LI> about 1 out of 5 page serves.
Anyone seen this? Should I not bother? Am I formatting the loops badly? Here's an example:
while ($whatever = mysql_fetch_array($blah_query)){
echo "\t\t\t\t\t\t";
echo "<li>\n";
echo "\t\t\t\t\t\t";
echo '<a href="#'.$whatever['name'].'" id="category_id_'.$whatever['id'].'">';
echo ucfirst($whatever['name']);
echo "</a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t</li>\n";
}
this seems as if the goal is to output a page source that types out the proper indentions for you?
at least for right now to debug and be easier read?
while ($whatever = mysql_fetch_array($blah_query)){
echo "\t\t\t\t\t\t";
echo "<li>\n";
echo "\t\t\t\t\t\t";
echo '<a href="#'.$whatever['name'].'" id="category_id_'.$whatever['id'].'">';
echo ucfirst($whatever['name']);
echo "</a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t</li>\n";
}
since you're using PHP to echo out those HTML codes, just type them as you would see them on the page source
while($whatever = mysql_fetch_array($blah_query)){
//When you want a new line, just hit enter. PHP will echo the carriage returns too
echo'
<li>
ucfirst($whatever['name'])
</li>
';
}
this is how I would do it so that it would line break every time including the first time incase I have a left over "</div>" or some other closing tag without a line break after it.
it will output a nicer clean list item that tabbed in with the breaks
Removing spaces between code can significantly decrease the sizes of files especially if your code is of significant length. By removing any indenting and minimising spaces within files, you can maximise connection speeds to your site by delivering the requested pages considerably faster than if you were indenting. This adds up if your website is receiving any reasonable amount of traffic, as each page served may be made more efficient by removing 5-10kb of spacing. In the long run, if you're serving users pages regularly, the added network strain can be minimised by ensuring your code uses as little of the space as possible.
Although, if you happen to be developing in a private environment, it's good practice to use indenting for debugging purposes. The style of the code allows you to follow it's logic and flow in comparison to minified code that lacks legibility.
Typically, removing the spaces between elements, is a way to 'save bandwidth' for high traffic sites. It is something akin to minifying JavaScript or CSS. If you are still in 'testing/development' mode, then sure, indent it, so you can see if you are making mistakes. However in any production environment, with any appreciable traffic, you should 'minify' you html too.
This is not just to cut back on the monetary cost of bandwidth. This is to cut down on the system resources cost as well. It takes a little longer to send a 45k file (with spaces) and it does a 29k file (without spaces). Therefore, your server can push it out faster, which in turn means it can free up a open connection faster, which means it can accept a new incoming connection now. There are lots of talks dedicated to this idea, of minification. Minification, coupled with compression, is the leading reason in why webpages are held to high standards for loading quickly. The less you send out, the faster you can do so, the more people you can get it too.
I am like you. Everything must be clean and tidy.
I would recommend using XSL as a templating engine. This autmatically make all your HTML properly formatted if you set it to formatOutput = true.
I use those setting for my local copy, but for the live copy I set XSL to use no fromatting and white space. This returns all the HTML on one line. This saves about 20-30% or whatever of the HTML file size. So you save bandwidth and get quicker load times. Probably slightly quicker for browsers to render too.
See:
http://www.php.net/xsl
$xsl->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$xsl->formatOutput = TRUE OR FALSE;
Just looking at my code the above is what I use to either set to indent nicely, or output all on one line.
I'm rather new to programming and i know how to separate PHP from HTML, but i would like to know if there is any difference in doing
this:
<?php $rand="I love apples" ?>
<h1>This is a title</h1>
<div>
<p>This is a paragraph</p>
<?php echo"The variable contains the string $rand"; ?>
</div>
?>
compared to doing this:
<?php
echo "<h1>This is a title</h1>";
echo "<div>";
echo "<p>This is a paragraph</p>";
echo "The variable contains the string $rand";
echo "</div>";
?>
Is there any difference between in performance etc, between splitting the PHP code from the HTML code and just echoing the whole page in php?
The best practice is not to seperate PHP from HTML, the best practice is to seperate logic from markup.
Also important is coding style. Proper line indentions. Using echo "</div>"; instead of echo"</div>";, valid HTML, not putting variables into quotations:
echo "The variable contains the string $rand";
better (why? see my comment below):
echo "The variable contains the string ",
$rand,
" :-)";
Your whole project gains much quality and worthness just by improving the code, writing clean, readable, maintainable. Imagine you want to change the Text, you would have to add or change lots of echoes.
Code Style Guides > Pear,
PSR, Zend <
encourage developers to keep their code readable, valid and cross-browser compatible
The problem is not performance, it's about readability and more importantly, maintainability.
Doing all the processing in one place, and all of the output in another (i.e. Logic and Presentation), would mean you will have an easier time altering one without affecting the other too drastically.
To your specific question, the top method is preferable by far, for the reasons listed above.
Taking your question at face value, there are two reasons that come to mind immediately:
Assuming you're using a smart editor, echoing all your HTML will cause you to lose syntax highlighting for it, so you're less likely to catch errors.
Because everything is inside a PHP string, now you have to worry about escaping all your other special characters. Try spitting out some Javascript with a string in it and let us know how fun that is.
However, when most people say something like "separating PHP from HTML" they are referring to the concept of separating your logic from your views. It means don't put complex business logic, computations, and database calls inside your html pages. Keep that all in pure PHP files, and have your html files contain minimal PHP that's only used to spit out your data.
<?php $rand="I love apples" ?>
<h1>This is a title</h1>
<div>
<p>This is a paragraph</p>
<?php echo"The variable contains the string $rand"; ?>
</div>
?>
The above looks poorly separated. This is what php/html separation should look like:
<?php
$rand="I love apples";
?>
<h1>This is a title</h1>
<div>
<p>This is a paragraph</p>
<p>The variable contains the string <?=$rand ?></p>
</div>
Performance-wise, that's not an issue but it would do much favor for programmers to be able to read the code easily, hence the need for HTML/PHP separation practices. Ideally, if you're going to do just one script, keep all your PHP code at top. Also, other reason for the separation is that IDE editors can easily format HTML nicely. If there's a HTML tag inside the PHP tag that is ending with a HTML tag outside of PHP, then HTML cannot be formatted correctly. For example:
<div><p>And it offers so much <?php echo "$features</p>
<h2>Proven Ideas";?></h2>
<p>More details ahead</p>
</div>
The above will run just fine but the IDE html formatter will likely be confused with missing end tags and won't format making it more difficult for programmers to read them.
I think you example is not a good one that makes it very clear why you should separate it.
The reason why you should separate not just HTML but the presentation, rendering or UI part of your application is clean coding and separation of concerns. This will make sure your get clean, easy to read code and makes your application maintable.
Take Wordpress for example, it is an extremely fugly mix of php and HTML. They even do SQL queries in the presentation layer of the application, if you can even draw a borderline between presentation and other logic in this thing.
You'll always have to output some dynamic content in your HTML but really try to reduce it to echoing variables and having some output formatting helper objects there. All business logic should be somewhere else, just not in the "templates" or whatever else you'll call the files that contain the output.
Have a look at the MVC pattern for example, it gives you a good idea of how and why you want to separate things.
In my opinion, it depends on the level of HTML formatting that is being done versus PHP logic. Nothing more & nothing less. It’s simply easier to read pure HTML as pure HTML or PHP as straight PHP. When it is all jummbled together—the way some templating systems handle it—it becomes a logical headache to read & debug. So I err on the side of placing HTML in PHP for my own sanity’s sake.
Unclear on the performance pluses or minuses if there are any. But can assure you that in 20+ years I have never had a server slow down because of too much HTML embedded in PHP
Personally, I would format your code example like this:
<?php
echo "<h1>This is a title</h1>"
. "<div>"
. "<p>This is a paragraph</p>"
. "The variable contains the string $rand"
. "</div>"
;
?>
I like this method since there is one echo—which makes it clear what is happening—and the rest of the HTML is just concatenated via . characters.
Also, remember all formatting in programming benefits HUMANS more than anything. A computer only needs to see the commands, so if you want to be pitch perfect for a machine, just code without any spaces or formatting. Heck, stop using full words & just use 1 letter variables! Oh wait, that is how it was done in ye olden days.
Nowadays compilers & caching systems are designed to take human readable code & make it machine optimized.
Which is all to say: You should code towards readability & logic on your part. Nothing more & nothing less.
For the most part, when I want to display some HTML code to be actually rendered I would use a 'close PHP' tag, write the HTML, then open the PHP again. eg
<?php
// some php code
?>
<p>HTML that I want displayed</p>
<?php
// more php code
?>
But I have seen lots of people who would just use echo instead, so they would have done the above something like
<?php
// some php code
echo("<p>HTML that I want displayed</p>");
// more php code
?>
Is their any performance hit for dropping out and back in like that? I would assume not as the PHP engine would have to process the entire file either way.
What about when you use the echo function in the way that dose not look like a function, eg
echo "<p>HTML that I want displayed</p>"
I would hope that this is purely a matter of taste, but I would like to know if I was missing out on something. I personally find the first way preferable (dropping out of PHP then back in) as it helps draw a clear distinction between PHP and HTML and also lets you make use of code highlighting and hinting for your HTML, which is always handy.
The first type is preferable, exactly for the reasons you mentioned.
Actually, echoing out whole chunks of html is considered bad practice.
No, there's no performance increase that would be visible.
Sometimes its just simply easier to output content using echo (for example, when inside a while or for loop) than to close the php tag.
I think there's a preprocessor which converts the same form into the second. That's what happens in ASP.NET, anyway. And in both ASP.NET and classic ASP, loops can actually stretch across raw-HTML regions.
There's no performance difference at all.
Just the style that produces the most readable code. Depending on the actual situation that can be either of the two.
But mixing HTML and PHP should be avoided where possible anyway. THis can be accomplished by using a template system for your views.
So I've always developed PHP pages like this: <?php goes at the top, ?> goes at the bottom, and all the HTML gets either print()ed or echo()ed out. Is that slower than having non-dynamic html outputted outside of <?php ?> tags? I can't seem to find any info about this.
Thanks!
--Mala
UPDATE: the consesus seems to be on doing it my old way being hard to read. This is not the case if you break your strings up line by line as in:
print("\n".
"first line goes here\n".
"second line goes here\n".
"third line");
etc. It actually makes it a lot easier to read than having html outside of php structures, as this way everything is properly indented. That being said, it involves a lot of string concatenation.
I'm not sure about speed, but it's typically best practice to separate dynamic elements and the display of them.
Check out a framework like CodeIgniter: This has a "controller" and a "model" that grab data, sort it or do whatever you like with it, and then feed it to a "view" (some sort of template).
This paradigm is called MVC, and is a really, really valuable thing to learn about. I've found its chief advantage to be easier-to-maintain code. I don't end up with a monster document that I have to re-learn each time I approach it.
Resources:
CodeIgniter
MVC
The difference in speed is probably negligible, however, when **print()**ing out all of your HTML with PHP, the code can get very ugly, and makes it much harder to read than if you just have plain HTML.
Edit: Also, if you're are **print()**ing out static HTML that doesn't change, really what is the point? It gives you no added benefit.
Pros
None that I can see
Cons
Code that is hard to read
One more step in processing for the PHP engine, which although probably not noticeable, it is an extra step.
The speed is negligible - trust me, this will not be your bottleneck.
Along with any other MVC framework, you might want to check out a simple templating system, such as Smarty, which separates your PHP logic from your HTML and also does caching.
I don't know if it's slower or faster, but (in my opinion) it makes the code a lot more difficult to understand. Which I guess is why I don't typically do it.
It is almost the same from a performance point of view.
I would set the focus on the readability of the code. If you have a performance problem, figure out the bottleneck and cache it.
Is that slower than having non-dynamic html outputted outside of <?php ?> tags?
Well yes, it is... marginally. But that's not really the issue: it's all about the readability.
this way everything is properly indented
Your example isn't indented at all, which is fairly typical for the print-heavy, PHP I've unfortunately had to maintain!
Try this approach to keeping good, consistent indentation:
<ul>
<?php
// block of arbitrary code blah blah
//
$conditions= get_conditions_from_request();
$isadmin= $user->privileges>=PRIV_ADMIN;
?>
<?php foreach (select_things($conditions) as $thing) { ?>
<li>
<strong><?php h($thing->title); ?></strong>
<?php if ($isadmin) { ?>
<a href="/editthing.php?id=<?php u($thing->id); ?> (Edit) </a>
<?php } ?>
<?php h($thing->description); ?>
</li>
<?php } ?>
</ul>
(This presumes a function h that calls echo htmlspecialchars and u that does echo htmlspecialchars urlencode. Getting this escaping stuff right is essential to having a secure site, and is something that's almost always wrong in print-based PHP, as it tends to use "blah $var blah"-style templating without any escaping at all.)
Maybe not the best practice, but I choose to mix and match print() statements. For large chunks of layout code, I don't use print(), but if I'm rendering a complex if/else or for/while block and I'd be exiting the PHP block every other word, then I'll print out the non-dynamic text with the dynamic text.
Performance is very negligible at best. You can create a page, and put a timer on it. (Here is a tutorial on creating a script timer)
Output the exact same data both ways, and measure it with as many samplings as you can get, this should roughly tell you which is faster. I'm guessing very close to the same.
I have seen a lot of these pages with PHP embedded inside HTML, and I don't like it. As Alex Mcp suggested you should be thinking about a MVC model.
The problem with scripts embedded into html is the flow control and logic aren't easy to read, and there are some wierd problems that occur here and there. The best solution for me is usually to use Smarty or the Zend Framework to create template pages and then swap the data that goes in and out. Much easier to manage in the long run.
This question already has answers here:
How to properly indent PHP/HTML mixed code? [closed]
(6 answers)
Closed 9 years ago.
This has been bugging me today after checking the source out on a site. I use PHP output in my templates for dynamic content. The templates start out in html only, and are cleanly indented and formatted. The PHP content is then added in and indented to match the html formating.
<ul>
<li>nav1</li>
<li>nav2</li>
<li>nav3</li>
</ul>
Becomes:
<ul>
<?php foreach($navitems as $nav):?>
<li><?=$nav?></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>
When output in html, the encapsulated PHP lines are dropped but the white space used to format them are left in and throws the view source formatting all out of whack. The site I mentioned is cleanly formatted on the view source output. Should I assume they are using some template engine? Also would there be any way to clean up the kind of templates I have? with out manually removing the whitespace and sacrificing readability on the dev side?
That's something that's bugging me, too. The best you can do is using tidy to postprocess the text. Add this line to the start of your page (and be prepared for output buffering havoc when you encounter your first PHP error with output buffering on):
ob_start('ob_tidyhandler');
You can't really get clean output from inlining PHP. I would strongly suggest using some kind of templating engine such as Smarty. Aside from the clean output, template engines have the advantage of maintaining some separation between your code and your design, increasing the maintainability and readability of complex websites.
i admit, i like clean, nicely indented html too. often it doesn't work out the way i want, because of the same reasons you're having. sometimes manual indentation and linebreaks are not preserverd, or it doesn't work because of subtemplates where you reset indentation.
and the machines really don't care. not about whitespace, not about comments, the only thing they might care about is minified stuff, so additional whitespace and comments are actually counter-productive. but it's so pretty *sigh*
sometimes, if firebugs not available, i just like it for debugging. because of that most of the time i have an option to activate html tidy manually for the current request. be careful: tidy automatically corrects certain errors (depending on the configuration options), so it may actually hide errors from you.
Does "pretty" HTML output matter? You'll be pasting the output HTML into an editor whenever you want to poke through it, and the editor will presumably have the option to format it correctly (or you need to switch editors!).
I find the suggestions to use an additional templating language (because that's exactly what PHP is) abhorrent. You'd slow down each and every page to correct the odd space or tab? If anything, I would go the other direction and lean towards running each page through a tool to remove the remaining whitespace.
The way I do it is:
<ul>
<?php foreach($navitems as $nav):?>
<li><?=$nav?></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>
Basically all my conditionals and loop blocks are flush left within the views. If they are nested, I indent inside the PHP start tag, like so:
<ul>
<?php foreach($navitems as $nav):?>
<?php if($nav!== null) : ?>
<li><?=$nav?></li>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>
This way, I see the presentation logic clearly when I skim the code, and it makes for clean HTML output as well. The output inside the blocks are exactly where I put them.
A warning though, PHP eats newlines after the closing tag ?>. This becomes a problem when you do something like outputting inside a <pre> block.
<pre>
<?php foreach($vars as $var ) ?>
<?=$var?>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</pre>
This will output:
<pre>
0 1 2 3 4 5 </pre>
This is kind of a hack, but adding a space after the <?=$var?> makes it clean.
Sorry for the excessive code blocks, but this has been bugging me for a long time as well. Hope it helps, after about 7 months.
You few times I have tidied my output for debugging my generated HTML code I have used tabs and newlines... ie;
print "<table>\n";
print "\t<tr>\n";
print "\t\t<td>\n";
print "\t\t\tMy Content!\n";
print "\t\t</td>\n";
print "\t</tr>\n";
print "</table>\n";
I about fell over when I read "I'm really curious why you think it's important to have generated HTML that's "readable". Unfortunately, there were quite a few people on this page (and elsewhere) that think this way...that the browser reads it the same so why worry about the way the code looks.
First, keeping the "code" readable makes debugging (or working in it in general by you or a developer in the future) much easier in almost all cases.
Furthermore, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, it's referred to as quality of workmanship. It's the difference between a Yugo and a Mercedes. Yes, they are both cars and they both will take you from point "A" to point "B". But, the difference is in the quality of the product with mostly what is not seen. There is nothing worse than jumping into a project and first having to clean up someone else's code just to be able to make sense of things, all because they figured that it still works the same and have no pride in what they do. Cleaner code will ALWAYS benefit you and anyone else that has to deal with it not to mention reflect a level of pride and expertise in what you do.
If it's REAL important in your specific case, you could do this...
<ul><?php foreach($navitems as $nav):?>
<li><?=$nav?></li><?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>
Although that is worse in my opinion, because your code is less readable, even though the HTML is as you desire.
I don't care how clean the output is - it's the original source code that produced it that has to be easy to parse - for me as a developer.
If I was examining the output, I'll run it through tidy to clean it up, if it were required to take a good look at it - but validators don't care about extra spaces or tabs either.
In fact, I'm more likely to strip whitespace out of the output HTML than put any in - less bytes on the wire = faster downloads. not by much, but sometimes it would help in a high traffic scenario (though of course, gzipping the output helps more).
Viewing unformatted source is very annoying with multiple nested divs and many records each containing these divs..
I came across this firefox addon called Phoenix Editor. You can view your source in it's editor and then click "format" and it works like a charm!
Link Here
Try xtemplate http://www.phpxtemplate.org/HomePage its not as well documented as id like, but ive used it to great effect
you would have something like this
<?php
$response = new xtemplate('template.htm');
foreach($navitems as $item)
{
$response->assign('stuff',$item);
$response->parse('main.thelist');
}
$response->parse('main');
$response.out('main');
?>
And the html file would contain
<! -- BEGIN: main -->
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<ul>
<! -- BEGIN: thelist -->
<li>{stuff}</li>
<!-- END: thelist -->
</ul>
</body>
</html>
I Agree, A clean source is very important, Its well commented, well structured and maintence on those sources, scripts, or code is very quick and simple. You should look into fragmenting your main, using require (prior.php, header.php, title.php, content.php, post.php) in the corresponding places, then write a new function under prior.php that will parse and layout html tags using the explode method and a string splitter, have an integer for tab index, and whenever </ is in the functions string then integer-- whenever < and > but not /> and </ are in the string integer ++ and it all has to be placed properly.... , use a for loop to rebuild another string tabindex to tab the contents integer times.