html and php easy question

weazy

I am looking for a tutorial or otherwise explanation of the logic behind:

echo "<form action=\"handler.htm\" method=post>";

it's not what is happening here that I want explanation, its the way its written.

the slashes in the form action specifically ....

I have noticed that other tags use those slashes too ... like:

echo '<br >';

why write it that way as opposed to: echo '<br>';

i am mostly self-taught and i missed this beginner lesson ....
any links to tutorials or an explanation of this format would be appreciated.

thanks in advance

eternalprophet

echo "<form action=\"handler.htm\" method=post>";

You should have the echo in between double quotes "". But in this case, you need double quotes "" in the form tag, so the \" allows you to do that. The \ functions as an escape character (believe thats the name) It just lets you add the " in the echo without closing it off. If you need to add a \ in the echo, you need to escape it with \, so you will end up with \ for a single slash, and \" for a double quote within an echo.

Hope this clears it up.

BTW '<br >' I believe this is a typo and should be <br /> to comple with XHTML standards.

rIkLuNd

Well, the \ is used to escape special characters. When you have a string inside " and " then if you want to have a " inside the string then you must escape it, otherwise you will get a parse error message from the php interpreter.

this will give you an error..!

$str = "here is some "text" that we want to print";

but this will not:

$str = "here is some \"text\" that we want to print";

in the <br> tag there should not be a \ but it should look like this so that it's xhtml complient.

<br />

Hope this helps a little bit!

weazy

thanks. i have used different style quotes:

echo "<td width='100%'>";
echo "text";
echo "</td>";

i assume in certain situations the different quotes wont work .... or its just another way of doing the same thing?

$str = "here is some 'text' that we want to print";

echo $str;

works ok, no?

rIkLuNd

yes it works ok, but when you're gonna print html then it should be double-quotes for it to be xhtml compliant. read more about it here

kevinsequeira

$str = "here is some 'text' that we want to print";

works cause its not the same quotes u can use single quotes ' enclosed within double-quotes "

reg
kevin