print with HTML

Anon

I know from experimenting that the follwoing works:

print "<TD>" . $data[$c] . "</TD>";

where as this does NOT:

print "<TD>" $data[$c] "</TD>";

(modified from the example for fgetcsv)

WHY ... what do the "." do?

TIA.

Anon

Hehe.

I've seen that too, and wondered ... but I'm a PHP newbie (2 weeks or so coding in PHP).

Does it have something to do with concatenation? That would be my guess.
-john

Anon

I've been doing this about 2 days ... so YOU'RE the expert :-)

Anon

I belive the .-operator is like a + sign but for strings instead of numbers..

so "hi" . " there" = "hi there"

Anon

yup,

. is the concatenation operator that joins 2 strings together. in fact, + used to be used, but now it means try and get numbers from the stings and add them (which is a far more useful thing to do with +)

eg. $val = "14" + "2"

$val would then = 16... and i think its quite tollerant to gubbins in the data as well (eg. "a14" + "ld2" would (maybe) have the same effect)

you don't always have to concatenate, if it's just a simple variable then PHP will be pretty smart, eg.

$greeting = "hello";
print "fred says $greeting world!";

will have the desired effect, but when it comes to arrays and objects, you're often best using the concatenation operator - if only to make things easier to read 🙂, you can always use the curly braces though, { }, to insist to PHP that the contents are a variable (that's if my memory serves me correctly, i dont use this method)...

print "fred can say {$greeting[2][1]} world";

dom
🙂