[RESOLVED] Correct the syntax of this line

mars16

some pls correct the following line, am sure its to do with ' or "

This line works fine: echo "<tr><td> $text </td></tr>";

BUT when i add nl2br to the varialbe $text i get problems

i have already tried the following:

echo "<tr><td> nl2br($text)</td></tr>";

i will get this on Browser nl2br(sample text)

i need to place ' or " but where do i place them?

bradgrafelman

What you're trying to do is concatenate different string pieces together. To learn more about this and how the syntax works, visit this manual page: [man]language.operators.string[/man]

cgraz

if you don't concatenate (I hate that word), then to php it's just a string (which is why it's printing your function call literally). Take a look at the link brad provided. You won't get away with not being able to concatenate in PHP. In the meantime, here's how your echo line would look:

echo "<tr><td>" . nl2br($text) . "</td></tr>";

Notice the syntax highlighting (blue vs. red).

mars16

thanks cgraz, it works.

I have read the link bradgrafelman posted but i couldn't understand the principles. is there another link but with simpler english

bradgrafelman

What didn't you understand? Even if you don't understand the definition, did you look at the coding example? You don't even need to understand the paragraph explaining concatenation if you just look at the 4 lines of code in Example 1 which covers two ideas.

The paragraph wasn't that confusing:

There are two string operators. The first is the concatenation operator ('.'), which returns the concatenation of its right and left arguments. The second is the concatenating assignment operator ('.='), which appends the argument on the right side to the argument on the left side.

One way to change strings is with a "concatenation" character, the period ('.'). It basically takes two separate strings and glues them together to make one string. Another way is to use the ".=" characters instead of just an equal sign ('=') when assigning the value to an object. Using these characters will actually just add whatever is on the right side onto the end of the variable/string on the left side.

cgraz

I learned through correcting parse errors when I started. Here's a few examples that might make the reading a little easier if you're struggling:

print "I drive a " . $year . " " . $make . " " . $model . " that's from a dealership near my house";

Notice that when I print the variables, i have space . space on each side. In some places i have quote space quote. Those are spaces between the variables so when it prints it's not all one word. Because i'm using double quotes to concatenate, the single quote in that's doesn't cause an error. If I was using single quotes to concatenate the exact same line, then it'd cause an error

print 'I drive a ' . $year . ' ' . $make . ' ' . $model . ' that's from a dealership near my house';

Notice the syntax highlight (red vs. blue) in both examples. By having a single quote in my text, the PHP thinks that it is the next quote in sequence in my concatenation. In that case, I would need to escape the single quote using a backslash like so: that\'s

Another example

$sql = "SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE username='".$username."'";

Once again, since I'm using double quotes to concatenate, the single quotes are part of the string. So when this prints, it will show something like:

SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE username='cgraz'

and the username will be surrounded by single quotes. Also as bradgrafelman mentioned in his post, .= can also be used to add onto an existing variable like this:

$msg = "Welcome to PHPBuilder. ";
$msg .= "Here you will find forums relating to PHP.";

will print: Welcome to PHPBuilder. Here you will find forums relating to PHP.

whereas

$msg = "Welcome to PHPBuilder. ";
$msg = "Here you will find forums relating to PHP.";

will print

Here you will find forums relating to PHP.

That's because the .= adds onto the variable message, whereas without it, I'm just changing the value of $msg.

Oh and one last example: If you had $file = 'test' and $ext = ".php", you wouldn't need any space when concatenating between them, so you could do this:

print "Filename is " . $file . $ext;

mars16

Thanks cgraz and other for explination, i do understand it now.