Limits of quotations...

jc94062

I'm trying to display images by calling an img src tag from a field in a db, which works fine, so does the alt=whatever on it, except when the whatever is two words. Because of the way I'm doing this to avoid complications I've got this kinda thing in my db...

Works fine, gives "whatever"...

doesn't gives "what" only

Now, <img src = 'http://www.mysite.com/images/pic.gif' alt='whatever'>

will work, but means quite a bit of recoding for something that from what I can see should work, is there a better way?

Thanks

brandonschnell

any data in html tags should be in quotes. place the alt tags in double quotes and you should be ok. you're expecting the browser to figure out what you want, but you're not following the html specs.

its a bad coding practice not to enclose any possible tag data in double quotes. you'll run across problems if you use content that users create.

jc94062

I know, and I WAS using that, but it was creating problems...

$image = "<img src = "http://www.mysite.com/images/image.gif" alt="whatever">";

Doesn't work of course, I guess I'll just have to change them all to

$image = "<img src = 'http://www.mysite.com/images/image.gif' alt='whatever'>";

Can't remember why I didn't do that before, hopefully it'll work anyways.

Btw... "use content that users create" I'm not, its set pictures depending on other variables, anyways, I guess its the long way :-(

Anon

James, Brandon is right about what he is saying. PHP/HTML (or any language for that matter) can't determine what you MEAN to say. It only literally interperts what you have written and it is doing just that.

To get what you want, you have to escape the inside quotes :

$image = "<img src = \"http://whateverpicturepath/you/want/image.gif\" alt = \"what ever text you want\">";

That will work if you make sure to escape () the inside quotes.

James wrote:

I know, and I WAS using that, but it was creating problems...

$image = "<img src = "http://www.mysite.com/images/image.gif" alt="whatever">";

Doesn't work of course, I guess I'll just have to change them all to

$image = "<img src = 'http://www.mysite.com/images/image.gif' alt='whatever'>";

Can't remember why I didn't do that before, hopefully it'll work anyways.

Btw... "use content that users create" I'm not, its set pictures depending on other variables, anyways, I guess its the long way :-(

jc94062

ah, forgot that way, tkx.
Still odd that it does work (at least on IE5) for the single words though.

brandonschnell

this is perfectly normal. If the quotes are left out, most versions of Netscape & IE will figure out what the tag data is for. However in cases with spaces but no quotes, the browser will handle the first word as you expect, then will assume that the rest of the words are tags that it doesn't understand, and wll ignore them.

jc94062

ah, tkx for the info.
Btw, the HTML link on your page, very good site that!
I learn something new each day!

H<sup>2</sup>SO<sup>4</sup>

:-)