What does "->" do

[Haddman]

I fell a little stupid about asking but what does "->" do?

[laserlight]

It denotes that the right hand side is a member of the left hand side. To understand what this means, read the PHP manual on:
Classes and Objects (PHP 4)
Classes and Objects (PHP 5)

[dougal85]

Incase you are familiar with other languages. Java, c#, JavaScript etc. use the dot ( . ) notation instead for accessing an objects properties and methods.

so, "->" is to PHP as "." is to Java