I'm so new, I don't even know if this is a noob question or not

Deaddog

I've searched the threads, google and a few other strange places, but I can't seem to figure this out.
I have a book by Jason Gilmore and it's way over my head, but I used it to install AMP and things actually seemed to go ok.
I have php5, apache 2.0.55, and mysql 5 installed on my machine.

The problem is this:
According to the book, this is supposed to return an IP address, but it doesn't work for me.

print "hi! Your IP address is: $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']";

but this does work. Notice the . and the quotes.

print "hi! Your IP address is:" .$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

Can someone please explain what happening? I think it might be related to some other pharsing problems that I'm having. Problems that I don't even want to mention right now.

Thanks, Jason

devinemke

a common newbie pitfall is the use of quotes. read manual page on strings, it does a pretty good job of explaining the use of single and double quotes. a brief example:

// this will not work
echo "hi! Your IP address is: $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']"; 

// this will work
echo 'hi! Your IP address is: ' . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

// this will work
echo "hi! Your IP address is: $_SERVER[REMOTE_ADDR]";

there are many different opnions on this but i personally use single quotes whenever possible and use the concatenation operator (".") to stich together variables and echo statements. scripts will execute faster if the PHP parser does not have to look within double quotes for variable expansion (though as a practical matter the difference is usually neglible).

Deaddog

Thanks. That clears up lots of things. I'm just glad it was a newbie pitfall and not a problem with my php installation.

Jason 😃