PHP: Whole HTML page as variable - is there a better way? - php

Question

I have a large form, in the end of the form a user is presented with a summary:
You have entered:
<table>
<tr>
<td>First name</td>
<td><?php echo $firstname ?></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Last name</td>
<td><?php echo $lastname ?></td>
</tr>
</table>
I first designed the summary page and now the thought came to me that it would be nice to send the user this page as a confirmation e-mail. What I have done now is this:
<?php $summarypage = "<table>
<tr>
<td>First name</td>
<td>".$firstname."</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Last name</td>
<td>".$lastname."</td>
</tr>
</table>";
echo $summarypage; ?>
For loops I use $summarypage .= "blabla"; within the loops.
When sending the e-mail I can just take $summarypage and attach it to my e-mail body. Beautiful.
Is what I am doing OK? It seems very "not elegant" to me.
Isn't $summarypage being rendered totally anew when I call it again in my e-mail - meaning all variables concatenated with it (e.g. $firstname) will be called again - performance hog?
Is there some kind of "buffer" I could just write the $summarypage variable to, so I have a plain-text variable afterwards? Would $newsummarypage = string($summarypage) do the trick?

Answer 1

Ignore performance on that level, it won't matter. If the method you show works for you, use it.
An alternative that makes things a bit more readable (because you won't need PHP openers / closers) is HEREDOC:
<?php $summarypage = <<<EOT
<table>
<tr>
<td>First name</td>
<td>$firstname</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Last name</td>
<td>$lastname</td>
</tr>
</table>
EOT;
?>

Answer 2

I think you are a bit confused about how strings/variables work in php. A little example might help
$s = "hello"; //stores the sequence 'h' 'e' 'l' 'l' 'o' in $s
$s = $s." world";//take the sequence stored in $s add the sequence ' world',
//and store in $s again
echo $s; // prints 'hello world'. That is what $s contains, what $s is
$summary = "<div>".$firstname."</div>"; // take '<div>', lookup what $firstname
//contains and add that, then add '</div>' and then store this
//new string thing('<div>Ishtar</div>') in $summary.
echo $summary; //$summary here knows nothing about $firstname,
//does not depend on it
All variables are evaluated when you use them. (Well, most of the time you use variables by evaluating them.)

Answer 3

$summarypage is a string, so it's just a bit of data assigned to a variable - a plain-text variable, as you said. Once the data is assigned to $summarypage, the work is done. You can happily write it out into pages, emails, databases and text files with no additional performance hits related to $summarypage.