What does this mean?

[davidthygreat]

 

I have this code within this exercise im doing trying to teach myself php,

 

i don't understand why there are slashes used in this echo statement could someone please tell me why you would need to use slashes in this statement this is reall

confusing.

 

echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"travel[]\" value=\"$t\" />\n";

 

thanks

[gizmola]

There are a few different ways to make strings in php.  I'm not going to write a book on it right now, but the main ones are:

 

$string = "Hello there";
$string2 = 'Hello there too';

 

So you can see that either single or double quotes delimits the start and end of the string.  So the obvious question becomes... how would i have a string like:

 

Hello there "friend"

 

With single quotes it would not be a problem.

 

$string = 'Hello there "friend"';

 

But if you tried to use double quotes, the parser would not know where you meant the string to end, and would generate a parsing error.

 

$string = "Hello there "friend""; // doesn't work

 

So when you want to embed characters in a string, you can use the escape character which in php is the backslash(\) to tell php that the character you're escaping (the following character) is a special character that should be treated as part of the string.

 

$string = "Hello there \"friend\"";

 

As you can see there are other escape characters like the "\n" which have special meaning in an interpolated php string (one created using enclosing "...")