Escaping tab characters

PHP_Novice2

My script has variables that store absolute paths, and runs on a Windows server. When a path contains the string "\t", PHP reads it as a tab:

$path = "c:\webdocs\mysite\temp";

echo $path; // Prints "c:\webdocs\mysite emp"

I can remedy this by placing another slash before 'temp', but this seems counterintuitive. Is that the best way to handle this?

laserlight

Use single quote delimited strings, e.g.,

$path = 'c:\webdocs\mysite\temp';

mpb001

It's not windows, when using " the string gets parsed by PHP when using ' it doesn't.

echo "monkey\tmonkey<br/>";
echo 'monkey\tmonkey<br/>';

NogDog

Most PHP functions can cope with forward slashes for paths even on Windows platforms, e.g.:

<?php
$path = "C:/wamp/www/test/test.php";
highlight_file($path);
?>

That way you do not need to worry about which quoting method to use or whether to escape your back-slashes with back-slashes.

laserlight

when using " the string gets parsed by PHP when using ' it doesn't.

That might be a little misleading, since in this case, for both types of string literals, PHP does not perform variable interpolation ("string parsing") as there are no variables embedded. Rather, PHP recognises more escape sequences, including \t, for double quoted strings, whereas only \ and \' are recognised for single quoted strings.