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In the last lesson, PHP Echo, we used strings a bit, but didn't talk about them in depth. Throughout your PHP career you will be using strings a great deal, so it is important to have a basic understanding of PHP strings. |
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Before you can use a string you have to create it! A string can be used directly in a function or it can be stored in a variable. Below we create the exact same string twice: first storing it into a variable and in the second case we send the string directly to echo. |
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$my_string = "MGEF - Unlock your potential!";
echo "MGEF - Unlock your potential!";
echo $my_string;
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MGEF - Unlock your potential! MGEF - Unlock your potential!
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Thus far we have created strings using double-quotes, but it is just as correct to create a string using single-quotes, otherwise known as apostrophes. |
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$my_string = 'MGEF - Unlock your potential!';
echo 'MGEF - Unlock your potential!';
echo $my_string;
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If you want to use a single-quote within the string you have to escape the single-quote with a backslash \ . Like this: \' ! |
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echo 'MGEF - It\'s Neat!';
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$newline = "A newline is \n";
$return = "A carriage return is \r";
$tab = "A tab is \t";
$dollar = "A dollar sign is \$";
$doublequote = "A double-quote is \"";
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Note: If you try to escape a character that doesn't need to be, such as an apostrophe, then the backslash will show up when you output the string.
These escaped characters are not very useful for outputting to a web page because HTML ignore extra white space. A tab, newline, and carriage return are all examples of extra (ignorable) white space. However, when writing to a file that may be read by human eyes these escaped characters are a valuable tool!
The two methods above are the traditional way to create strings in most programming languages. PHP introduces a more robust string creation tool calledheredoc that lets the programmer create multi-line strings without using quotations. However, creating a string using heredoc is more difficult and can lead to problems if you do not properly code your string! Here's how to do it:
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$my_string = <<<TEST
mgef.com
Webmaster Tutorials
Unlock your potential!
TEST;
echo $my_string;
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There are a few very important things to remember when using heredoc.
- Use <<< and some identifier that you choose to begin the heredoc. In this example we chose TEST as our identifier.
- Repeat the identifier followed by a semicolon to end the heredoc string creation. In this example that was TEST;
- The closing sequence TEST; must occur on a line by itself and cannot be indented!
Another thing to note is that when you output this multi-line string to a web page, it will not span multiple lines because we did not have any <br /> tags contained inside our string! Here is the output made from the code above.
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mgef.com Webmaster Tutorials Unlock your potential!
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