Simple variable...

[pneudralics]

$RED = "";
$RED = all this stuff here;

I see this a lot and I always wonder why they have something like $RED =""; then they go to $RED = to value. What's the point of $RED =""; being there before the $RED = to value?

Still learning.

[bpat1434]

It instantiates it. Take this for example:

echo 'This is an variable pre-incremented: '.++$i;

That will give an error of the warning level about a non-existant variable $i. Now, if you do $i='' or whatever, you can append (or prepend) to it whatever you want.

It's also a way of knowing that the variable will have a default value. So you can code knowing that if say, you use it earlier in a script, you don't have to worry about what the value will be since you know it will be empty.

And a lot of times, it's used just before loops so that items can be appended to it. Something like:

$arr = array('This', 'set', 'of', 'words', 'will', 'make', 'a', 'sentence');

$output = ''; // Start it!!
for($i=0; $i<count($arr); $i++)
{
  $output .= $arr[$i].' ';
}
echo $output;

That will output:

This set of words will make a sentence 

I hope all that made sense

[pneudralics]

I've noticed that in the same folder they'll have $RED on a different php file and it'll display all the values of $RED. I didn't find any kind of including. How does that work? I thought it'll only display the values of the variable on the same php page.

[bpat1434]

There's either a hidden include you don't see, or they're declaring it global somehow.

[pneudralics]

Thanks for the help