Proper concatenaton in href for querystring

[cofey12681]

Hello, what I'm trying to do is make a very basic shopping cart that interacts with mysql. Right now I have some code that will spit out a column, category in an echo statement with <li>. What I need though is to properly concatenate this for a query string...

 

What I mean is, the user clicks the link, they get brought to the respective page that selects all records for that particular passed in category.

 

This is what I have, and I have not been able to figure it out, sometimes I see nothing with no eror, but many times I'll get parse erros referring to ".

 

echo " "<li> . "<a href=" . $row["category"] . " . ">" something here..., maybe $row['category"] again...  . "</a>" . "</li>" . "; 

 

Can someone please educate me on the right way to do this.... thanks.And then once that's done, How would I read the category on page load? I am used to .net but not php.

[IchBin]

Well it will boil down to personal preference with using single or double quotes. But I prefer the single quote method. This should  be properly formatted.

 

echo '<li><a href="' . $row["category"] . '">something here..., maybe '.$row['category"].' again...</a></li>";

[xangelo]

The error you are receiving seems to occur because of the way you are performing the concatenation.

 

echo "<li> . "<a href=" . $row["category"] . "> something here..., maybe $row['category"] again...   </a></li>"; 

 

You only need to do the concatenation when you are trying to insert bits of php. So

</a>"."</li>

is complete unnecessary.

 

However, like IchBin said, it's easier to to separate which quotes you use. Keep single quotes to php and double quotes to html.