Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Variable Substitution

PHP allows you to define strings using three methods: single quotation marks, double quotation marks, or heredoc notation. Heredoc is not discussed in this chapter because it is fairly rare compared to the other two methods, but single quotation marks and double quotation marks work identically, with one minor exception: variable substitution.

Consider the following code:

<?php  $age = 25  echo "You are ";   echo $age;?>

That is a particularly clumsy way to print a variable as part of a string. Fortunately, if you put a variable inside a string, PHP performs variable substitution, replacing the variable with its value. That means we can rewrite the code like this:

<?php  $age = 25  echo "You are $age";?>

The output is the ...