[RESOLVED] Whats wrong with this line

boombanguk

echo "<a href='$row["link"]'>$row["title"]</a>";

I'm trying to get the html to contain a var from the php.

etully

Try this:
echo "<a href='".$row["link"]."'>".$row["title"]."</a>";

Piranha

The error is that when you insert the " sign in the string PHP thinks the string have ended. The "best" solution is what etully suggested.

boombanguk

what does the ' symbol do in that line?

and so you want php to think the string has ended so the var can be used??

bradgrafelman

The ' is a single quote, which etully used to delimit the values of the HTML attributes.

To answer your question about the PHP, yes, etully's code uses concatenation; whenever you want the value of a variable, escape out of the string and add the variable using a period. It's basically combining two or more strings together.

Some alternatives include:

echo "<a href='{$row["link"]}'>{$row["title"]}</a>";
// -- OR --
echo "<a href='$row[link]'>$row[title]</a>";

etully

The ' is a single quote, which etully used to delimit the values of the HTML attributes.

I used single quotes to delimit the HTML values because that's what you used in your original example of how you wanted your actual HTML to look.

In other words, your original example was trying to make html that would look like this:

<a href='http://www.yoursite.com/filename.php'>Title</a>

so I put double quotes around the strings in the echo statement.

The reason I used concatenation is that I find that I run into errors with complex variables in an echo statement. For example, this line won't usually do what you expect it to do:

echo "<a href='$row[1]["link"]'>$row[1]["title"]</a>";

so I use this instead:

echo "<a href='".$row[1]["link"]."'>".$row[1]["title"]."</a>";

etully

OHHHHH!!!!!
Now I get it. That's why bradgrafelman put the curly braces around the variable!
Very clever.