memory allocation failuer while creating dynamic HTML tables

[barsuk1]

Hi there,
I have a web page written on PHP. The PHP script itself receives the
file uploaded by user, parses it and displays HTML table with the
user data - one table row per item. Let's say that (very simplified) PHP
code in question goes like this

[PHP]echo "<table>";
foreach ($user_data as $key => $item ){
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td> Row no: ".$key."</td>";
echo "<td> user item: ".$item."</td>";
echo "/<tr>";
}

echo "</table>";[/PHP]

i.e. each element of user_data array is echoed enclosed by HTML
tags in some form, and sometimes additional table cells that do not contain user supplied data are echoed as well.

Recently I've found that for large user_data array sizes (~500 rows in my case) I'm running into memory allocation problem - I get the
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of XXX bytes exhausted (tried to allocate YYY bytes) ... message and the script dies.

I understand that the problem is that each (event constant, double quoted string with HTML inisde) string is allocated many times and is not freed properly,
and hence the memory gets exhausted.

What is the best way to handle this problem?

Thanks a lot for your help,
Igor.

[code green]

Strange that you are running out of memory for about 500 rows.
Are you aware of the configuration changes you can make in php.ini?
What you are doing is not particularly memory intensive.

understand that the problem is that each (event constant, double quoted string with HTML inisde) string is allocated many times and is not freed properly,

Nothing is freed until you free it or the script ends.
But your code is the slowest method for echoing out HTML.
The concatenation is great but use single quotes instead of double, they are about 4 times faster to parse.
And this could be written in one echo statement, this saves multiple function calls.
Even faster is to close php and write raw HTML then re-open PHP.
But these are mainly speed issues.
I suspect the memory is being consumed in your file handling prior to this

[barsuk1]

Strange that you are running out of memory for about 500 rows.
Are you aware of the configuration changes you can make in php.ini?

The problem itself happens when PHP runs on the server of my web hosting provider, so I can't play with php.ini there.

What you are doing is not particularly memory intensive.
Nothing is freed until you free it or the script ends.

So is there a way to free memory allocated for echoed strings at the end
of each loop iteration?

But your code is the slowest method for echoing out HTML.
The concatenation is great but use single quotes instead of double, they are about 4 times faster to parse.
And this could be written in one echo statement, this saves multiple function calls.
Even faster is to close php and write raw HTML then re-open PHP.
But these are mainly speed issues.
I suspect the memory is being consumed in your file handling prior to this

I'll check this out...

Thanks,
Igor

[code green]

So is there a way to free memory allocated for echoed strings at the end
of each loop iteration?

Sorry, got a bit side-tracked by your question
Yes there are the ob() functions which buffer output.
[PHP]ob_start();
echo "<table>";
foreach ($user_data as $key => $item ){
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td> Row no: ".$key."</td>";
echo "<td> user item: ".$item."</td>";
echo "/<tr>";
}
echo "</table>";
$out = ob_get_clean();
var_dump($out);[/PHP]