What is the best way to add two strings together?

Question

I read somewehere (I thought on codinghorror) that it is bad practice to add strings together as if they are numbers, since like numbers, strings cannot be changed. Thus, ad

Answer 1

Found this post from Google, and thought I'd run some benchmarks, as I was curious what the result would be. (Benchmarked over 10,000 iterations using a benchmarker that subtracts its own overhead.)

    Which                        2 strings   10 strings   50 strings
    ----------------------------------------------------------------
    $a[] then implode()         2728.20 ps      6.02 μs     22.73 μs
    $a . $a . $a                 496.44 ps      1.48 μs      7.00 μs
    $b .= $a                     421.40 ps ★    1.26 μs      5.56 μs
    ob_start() and echo $a      2278.16 ps      3.08 μs      8.07 μs
    "$a$a$a"                     482.87 ps      1.21 μs ★    4.94 μs ★
    sprintf()                   1543.26 ps      3.21 μs     12.08 μs

So there's not much in it. Probably good to avoid sprintf() and implode() if you need something to be screaming fast, but there's not much difference between all the usual methods.