PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual Quickpro Guide, Second Edition

About Strings

The first—arguably most important—variable type I’ll go into is strings. A string is merely a quoted chunk of letters, numbers, spaces, punctuation, and so forth. These are all strings:

• 'Tobias'

• "In watermelon sugar"

• '1,000'

• 'February 3, 2005'

To make a string variable, assign a string value to a valid variable name:

$first_name = 'Tobias';

$today = 'February 3, 2005';

To print out the value of a string, use either echo() or print():

echo $first_name;

To print the value of string within a context, use double quotation marks:

echo "Hello, $first_name";

In a way, you’ve already worked with strings once—when using the predefined variables in the preceding section.

To use strings

1.	Create a new HTML document in your text editor, ...