Question

I’m almost sure the answer to this is “None at all!” but I’ll ask anyway. If you have a conditional statement in PHP which echos a line of html, is there any difference performance-wise between these 2 examples:

<?php if ($output) { ?>
  <h2><?=$output;?></h2>
<?php } ?>

and

<?php if ($output) { echo "<h2>".$output."</h2>"; } ?>

Answer 1

The answer literally is “None at all”. Consider

<span>
<?php
  echo $myMessage;
?>
</span>

and

<?php
  echo "<span>\n";
  echo $myMessage;
  echo "</span>";
?>

I’m going from memory (of a few years ago), but at that point the Zend bytecode compiler produces essentially identical output; “literal” HTML was compiled into an echo statement containing the text.