Learn PHP Variables
Learn about PHP variables and the string and number data types.
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Key Concepts
Review core concepts you need to learn to master this subject
Parsing Variables within PHP Strings
Reassignment of PHP Variables
Concatenating Strings in PHP
Appending a String in PHP
PHP Strings
PHP copying variables
PHP String Escape Sequences
PHP Evaluation Order during Assignment
Parsing Variables within PHP Strings
Parsing Variables within PHP Strings
$my_var = "cat";
echo "There is one $my_var on the mat";
/* If there were three cats, then you can type: */
echo "There are three {$my_var}s on the mat ";
/* The curly braces help to avoid confusion between the variable name and the letter s, so PHP does not consider the variable name as my_vars */In PHP, variables can be parsed within strings specified with double quotes (").
This means that within the string, the computer will replace an occurence of a variable with that variable’s value.
When additional valid identifier characters (ie. characters that could be included in a variable name) are intended to appear adjacent to the variable’s value, the variable name can be wrapped in curly braces {}, thus avoiding confusion as to the variable’s name.
- 2We use quotation marks to indicate the start and end of a string. The quotation marks tell the computer that we want everything inside them to be treated as a single piece of data. But how do we in…
- 3It can be useful to combine two strings together. This process is called string concatenation, and we can use the concatenation operator (.) to do this. An operator is a character that perfor…
- 5Let’s look at an example of creating a variable: $my_name = “Aisle Nevertell”; In the code above, we’re actually doing two things with a single statement: we’re declaring a new variable by givi…
- 6Once we’ve declared a variable and assigned a value to it, we can use it as many times as we want. We refer to a variable by using the dollar sign followed by the variable’s name. $favorite_food …
- 7In the last exercise, we saw how concatenating a number of strings and string variables got annoying. There’s an easier way! PHP strings allow us to place variables directly into double quoted st…
- 8The word variable comes from the latin variāre which means “to make changeable.” This is an apt name because the value assigned to a variable can change. 
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Learn PHP Variables
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