[RESOLVED] PHP 101 string question

rtcary

I am confused about the inclusion of HTML characters in a string and how to display the string. For instance,

$s = "My string";
echo $s; // prints "My string"

$s = "<My string>";
echo $s // prints ""

How can I have $s print "<My string>"?

bradgrafelman

rtcary wrote:
How can I have $s print "<My string>"?

You've already done that in your second code example. Don't believe me? Run the same test on the command line, or else view the source code of the resulting page in your browser.

I suspect, however, that you don't want to output "<My string>" but you actually want to output "<My string>", in which case you'd want to output the returned value of a function like [man]htmlentities/man.

rtcary

I am missing something!

$s1 = "My string"; 
echo $s1 . "<br />"; // prints "My string" 

$s2 = "<My string>"; 
echo $s2; // prints "" rather than the contents of the string

Only $s1 prints anything and I want $s2 to be displayed.

The above code is at http://www.toddcary.com/test/test_tags/test_print.php and only $s1 prints.

What am I missing?

Todd

NogDog

Do a "view source" of that page in your browser, and you'll see that it did, in fact, output:

My string<br /><My string>

Remember, the browser does not display tags (even if they are not valid HTML tags). If the objective is to show the tags in the actual browser output, then you need to use Brad's suggestion:

echo htmlentities($s2);

bradgrafelman

Or, if the page isn't HTML, set the Content-Type header to text/plain rather than text/html.

rtcary

Dah! I should have realized that!

Thanks for your patience! And it would not be so embarrassing if I had not been playing with PHP/HTML for so long! :o

Todd