Concatenation vs. Interpolation

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Hi,

FASTER CODE!

This question involves Coding Style, Readability, Write-ability and
Performance.
Some people use the . operator to concat an string to a variable, some
people use interpolation (embeding variable into string).

=====================
1st Method (Concatenation)
$str = 'My name is ' . $name;

2nd Method (Interpolation)
$str = "My name is $name";
=====================

I know that the 1st Method is much faster, according to
some benchmarks, which one of them is available
in the book "Advanced PHP Programming, page 470".

Could we consider the 1st Method as a "Best Practice", which offers
better Performance?

I know that the performance here is not very much, but is it
considerable in a high-traffic website?

Thank you in advanced for sharing your opinions,
Behzad

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Re: Concatenation vs. Interpolation

On 8/11/07, AmirBehzad Eslami wrote:
> Hi,
>
> FASTER CODE!
>
> This question involves Coding Style, Readability, Write-ability and
> Performance.
> Some people use the . operator to concat an string to a variable, some
> people use interpolation (embeding variable into string).
>
> =====================
> 1st Method (Concatenation)
> $str = 'My name is ' . $name;
>
> 2nd Method (Interpolation)
> $str = "My name is $name";
> =====================
>
> I know that the 1st Method is much faster, according to
> some benchmarks, which one of them is available
> in the book "Advanced PHP Programming, page 470".
>
> Could we consider the 1st Method as a "Best Practice", which offers
> better Performance?
>
> I know that the performance here is not very much, but is it
> considerable in a high-traffic website?
>
> Thank you in advanced for sharing your opinions,
> Behzad
>

Code readability is quite important when working with a team on a
project, and if you got for method 1 on things like this:
$str = '';
It gets quite inreadable, having a double qoute next to a single quote.
while this looks much better:
$str = "";

I just did some benchmarks myself, and you can see that concatenation
is definitly a little bit fast, but it's only 2 seconds on 10 million
loops:
For 10,000,000 loops:
Concatenation single quote:5.62786102295
Concatenation double quote:5.63359999657
Interpolation:7.32201290131

Test code used:

$x = 0;
$str = '';
$add = '?';

$time[1] = microtime(TRUE);
for($x = 0; $x < 10000000; $x++) {
$str = '';
}
$time[2] = microtime(TRUE);

$x = 0;
$str = '';
$add = '?';

$time[3] = microtime(TRUE);
for($x = 0; $x < 10000000; $x++) {
$str = "";
}
$time[4] = microtime(TRUE);

$x = 0;
$str = '';
$add = 'def';

$time[5] = microtime(TRUE);
for($x = 0; $x < 10000000; $x++) {
$str = "";
}
$time[6] = microtime(TRUE);

echo 'For 10,000,000 loops:';
echo '
Concatenation single quote:'.($time[2]-$time[1]);
echo '
Concatenation double quote:'.($time[4]-$time[3]);
echo '
Interpolation:'.($time[6]-$time[5]);

?>

Tijnema

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