MouseOver within PHP causing Errors

Anon

I'm trying to put a bit of JavaScript in a block of PHP and it gives me errors. I'm putting a backslash before all of the quotation marks in my JavaScript but it says they are invalid characters. If I don't use backslashes, it thinks the quotes indicate the end of my echo statement. I'm going crazy! My code looks something like this:
<MAP NAME="menumap">
if ($menuID == "8") {
echo "<AREA SHAPE=\"rect\" COORDS=\"0,334,93,368\" NOHREF>";
} else {
echo "<AREA SHAPE=\"rect\" COORDS=\"0,334,93,368\" HREF=\"index.php3?menuID=8\" onMouseover=\"document.button8.src=A_on.src;status=\'Back to the Home Page...\'; return true;\" onMouseOut=\"document.button8.src=off.src;return true;\">";
}

Any ideas??

Anon

Could be those semicolons.... if I were you, I would write the javascript into an external file and include it inside of the <HEAD> tag. That way, you could just use
<A ... onmouseover="dothis('whatever')">.

Anon

I haven't looked through the code but if I were you I'd write the code as:

snippet >>>
if ($menuID == '8') {
echo '<AREA SHAPE="rect" COORDS="0,334,93,368" NOHREF>';
}
<<< end snipper

It is a good idea to enclose strings in php with single quotes instead of double quotes. It should also be faster since php don't parse string enclosed by single quotes. Only use double quotes if you really need it.

/Dotvoid