ITEC 325 2016spring ibarland

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php-strings
php strings

• A string (or “string-literal”) is any number of characters enclosed within a pair of either single (') or double (") quotation marks. Strings can contain any combination of letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces.
  Note that unlike many languages, string-literals can contain contain newlines:

  <?php echo "hello there everybody!"; echo ' -- Dr. Nick '; ?>

• Rule of thumb: Use double-quoted strings most of the time, in your program.
  We'll see their differences; experience suggests that double-quoted strings are more convenient for most purposes, in php.
• If using double-quotes, the and you want to include a double-quote in your string-literal, precede that character with a backslash \". You can also embed special characters like newlines by using \n, so "hi\nbye" is a six-character string, not seven. This is what you might be used to from most other programming languages.
• If using single-quotes, the and you want to include a single-quote in your string-literal, precede that character with a backslash \', sensibly enough.
  However, note that no other characters can be quoted: 'hi\nbye' and 'hi\"bye' are both seven-character strings, not six!
• Just to keep things odd: double-quoted literals allow most standard quoted characters except for \' so "hi\'bye" is a seven-character string, not six!
• No matter what type of string you're using, don't try to quote the other type of quote-marks.
• Furthermore: If a string-literals delimited with double-quotes contains variables (a dollar-sign), then the variable gets replaced with its value!
  This “interpolation”¹ occurs (only) within double-quoted strings, not single-quoted. This is feature of php, to make string-generation easy.
  Note: I suggest using double-quotes for most php strings, by default. For HTML, we'll tend to use single-quotes
• String examples:
  

  $str = "How are you?"; $first_name = "John"; $str = "How are you " . $first_name . "?"; $str = "How are you $first_name?"; // alternately $date = "1/01/2010"; // this is a string! $str2 = "I said, \"how are you?\""; // To use a variable followed by literal-chars that aren't part of the variable name: $str3 = "Curly braces are as cute as you are, ${first_name}y-poo!";

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©2015, Ian Barland, Radford University Last modified 2016.Feb.02 (Tue)

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