[RESOLVED] Help With Concatenation

SquirrelJ

I am struggling to get my head around concatenation when the examples get harder.

I understand the following example easily

$a = "Hello ";
$b = $a . "World!";

However the following example is confusing me

echo "Name:".$row['name'] .", Owner:".$row['owner'].", Species:".$row['species']."<br/>";

In the above example I don’t understand why and where and the reason behind why we use the “ to complete the string.

Could someone please explain this string to me and the reason why its formatted like this???

I understand that we are outputting Name: and then concatenating the database result to this and then concatenating a comma to the string and then the same again and so on. But I don’t understand where and why we use the “

Cheers for any help.

leatherback

2 and ' are just identifiers for PhP that the information that follows needs to be taken as-is and not interpreted. In othe rwords: It tells PhP that it is a string. Nothing mysterious about it. And when you show the ' or " again, you tell PhP: OK, pay attention again: Now we are back in PhP code

SquirrelJ

Cheers leatherback that as sorted it now. I was unsure before and it took me loads of guessing to work out the correct way but now I actually understand it i am quite good at it.

Thnak Yiu

Weedpacket

One illustration that can help here is to use syntax-highlighting. In

$a = "Hello ";
$b = $a . "World!";

and

echo "Name:".$row['name'] .", Owner:".$row['owner'].", Species:".$row['species']."<br/>";

the literal strings are in red, identifiers are in blue, and punctuation and operators are in green. It almost goes without saying that PHP needs to know where each string begins and ends or it will get confused about which bits of the line are code it is supposed to interpret and which bits are not.