Possible Duplicates:
How are echo and print different in PHP?
Is there any difference between ‘print’ and ‘echo’ in PHP?
What’s the difference of echo,print,print_r in PHP?
There are several ways to print output in PHP; including but not limited to:
echo 'Hello'; echo ('Hello'); print 'Hello'; print ('Hello'); Are there any differences between these four? Also, do the parentheses make any difference at all?
Two differences:
print has a return value (always 1), echo doesn't. Therefore print can be used as an expression.
echo accepts multiple arguments. So you may write echo $a, $b instead of echo $a . $b.
Concerning the parentheses: They are simply wrong in my eyes. They have no function at all. You could as well write echo (((((((((($a)))))))))); people usually include parentheses from ignorance, thinking that print is a function. Furthermore it increases the chance of misinterpretation. For example print("foo") && print("bar") does not print foobar, because PHP interprets this as print(("foo") && print("bar")). So bar1 would be printed, even though it looks different.
foobar, if I didn't stop to think about it.return($a) will not work, because it will not return a reference to $a, but the result of the expression ($a), which obviously is a value, not a reference. But this is off topic, because we're talking about print and echo ^^