woot

You may have figured it out by now but replying to your question '=' means you're assigning a value to a variable. For example: $a = 5; //means your variable $a receives the value 5 When you use '.=' it will append a string to the value already contained in the variable like $a = "This is the first sentence."; $a .= " This is the second sentence."; After this your variable $a will contain the string "This is the first sentence. This is the second sentence.". I hope it's clear enough for you to understand.