Inside, the web is all about passing around and manipulating strings of text - so the programming langauges of the web such as PHP have to be really strong in their string handling facilities. I give you two new examples from last week's course ... easy lessons that form the bedrock on which the powerful stuff is built:
An (almost) literal string - what you see is what you get:
$literal = 'This is a string with $things and \t things in it!';
A string with variable interpollation and \ escaped special sequences:
$interp = "This is a string with $things and \t things in it!";
A string which is run as an operating system command, and the result is returned to you:
$ranit = `uptime`;
As well as using the single characters shown above, PHP supports a "here document format where the delimiter is any unique word / set of characters that will appear to terminate on a line of its own.
$terms = <<< LONG
This is available subject to the laws of Papua New Guinea as they
were in 1847, together with royal approval from King Zog of
Albania when eating $things.
LONG;
See how that runs
[here]. Full source code
[here] (written 2013-04-27)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
H107 - String Handling in PHP [31] Here documents - (2004-08-28)
[54] PHP and natural sorting - (2004-09-19)
[337] the array returned by preg_match_all - (2005-06-06)
[422] PHP Magic Quotes - (2005-08-22)
[463] Splitting the difference - (2005-10-13)
[493] Running a Perl script within a PHP page - (2005-11-12)
[558] Converting between acres and hectares - (2006-01-08)
[560] The fencepost problem - (2006-01-10)
[574] PHP - dividing a string up into pieces - (2006-01-23)
[589] Robust PHP user inputs - (2006-02-03)
[608] Don't expose your regular expressions - (2006-02-15)
[642] How similar are two words - (2006-03-11)
[716] Evaluating arithmetic expressions in configuration files - (2006-05-10)
[728] Looking ahead and behind in a Regular Expression - (2006-05-22)
[1008] Date conversion - PHP - (2006-12-26)
[1058] PHP Regular expression to extrtact link and text - (2007-01-31)
[1195] Regular Express Primer - (2007-05-20)
[1336] Ignore case in Regular Expression - (2007-09-08)
[1372] A taster PHP expression ... - (2007-09-30)
[1533] Short and sweet and sticky - PHP form input - (2008-02-06)
[1603] Do not SHOUT and do not whisper - (2008-04-06)
[1613] Regular expression for 6 digits OR 25 digits - (2008-04-16)
[1799] Regular Expressions in PHP - (2008-09-16)
[2046] Finding variations on a surname - (2009-02-17)
[2165] Making Regular Expressions easy to read and maintain - (2009-05-10)
[2238] Handling nasty characters - Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, Lua - (2009-06-14)
[2629] Curly braces within double quoted strings in PHP - (2010-02-09)
[3020] Handling (expanding) tabs in PHP - (2010-10-29)
[3424] Divide 10000 by 17. Do you get 588.235294117647, 588.24 or 588? - Ruby and PHP - (2011-09-08)
[3515] PHP - moving from ereg to preg for regular expressions - (2011-11-11)
[3516] Regular Expression modifiers in PHP - summary table - (2011-11-12)
[3534] Learning to program in PHP - Regular Expression and Associative Array examples - (2011-12-01)
[3788] Getting more than a yes / no answer from a regular expression pattern match - (2012-06-30)
[3789] More than just matching with a regular expression in PHP - (2012-06-30)
[3790] Solution looking for a problem? Lookahead and Lookbehind - (2012-06-30)
[4072] Splitting the difference with PHP - (2013-04-27)
Some other Articles
Further recent PHP examplesA comment on comments in PHPLearning about Object Orientation in PHP - a new set of examplesSetting up strings in PHPPassing variable between PHP pages - hidden fields, cookies and sessionsEven early on, separate out your program from your HTML!Arrays in PHP - contain different and even mixed data typesThe woman, the television, the bullock and DarlingtonMVC and Frameworks - a lesson from first principles in PHP