As mentioned before, this site is powered by PHP (version 5
at the moment) and it is powered by echo and print statements.
Both of these look like they are exactly the same,
but underneath there is a difference.
Output in PHP
Both echo and print serve similar purposes. Both of these statements are designed to output HTML to the page.
For instance, some pages are updated through a seperate file
and refreshed using AJAX. The echo and print functions
can perform this task.
Data being passed around this way makes for dynamic content which can be processed by the server.
The print function does exactly the same as echo bar the fact that it
returns the text from a function. This means that when the
system prints, it can then also be assigned to a variable.
<?php //This is an example of print print '<p>Hello world!</p>'; ?>
Echo
The echo function is considered faster than print because it is void, that
is it has no return value. The echo function cannot have a variable bound to
it. This is an advantage of echo over print, unless it is
required to bind some variable to the return value of print (an int
that returns whether or not the print was successful
or not).
<?php //This is an example of echo echo 'Hello there world!'; ?>
