Jumping in and out of PHP if/else

because if you kept everything inside one php block you would have to echo out that html tag. breaking the php block up into pieces allows you to write plain html that will appear on the screen without having to use the echo command to output it.

heres what you would have to do if you did it without breaking it up

<?php if (isset($_GET["status"]) AND $_GET["status"] == "thanks") { 
                echo "<p>Thanks for the email! I&rsquo;ll be in touch shortly.</p>";
  } else 
{ ?>

obviously its not that hard to do for the above case, but when you have to echo out multiple variable values or stuff with lots of quotation marks and include them in html its easier to break it up so you dont have to concatenate a bunch of stuff together. you can just break your php statements up into small pieces and then you dont have to deal with concatenating everything together into one big string.

here is a situation where it gets messy

<?php if (isset($_GET["status"]) AND $_GET["status"] == "thanks") { 
                echo "<p>Thanks for the email," . $name . "!" .  "I&rsquo;ll be in touch by" . $date ." </p>";
  } else 
{ ?>

when you have multiple variables that need to be output, you have to concatenate them together and its very hard to read. you can separate your php tags like this to make it easy:

<?php if (isset($_GET["status"]) AND $_GET["status"] == "thanks") { ?>
                <p>Thanks for the email,<?php echo $name?>! I will be in touch by<?php echo $date?></p>
<?php  } else 
{ ?>

it doesnt just apply to if statements either, anytime you have to weave html in with your php you may want to break it up.