Month: September 2021

This post is part of the PHP Snippets series where I will be covering the basics of developing in PHP.

The sprintf function provides the same functionality as the printf function, but silently.

This means you would either need to echo the output or concatenate it with a string and echo that string.

$number = 500;
$string = 'miles';

echo sprintf( 'But I would walk %d %s', $number, $string );

This post is part of the PHP Snippets series where I will be covering the basics of developing in PHP.

The printf function is similar to the echo function in that it will output text, but differs in that it outputs a formatted string.

The syntax of the printf function is:

printf( string, arg 1, arg 2, ... )

Multiple arguments can be provided to the function for each of the placeholders to be replaced.

Continue reading “PHP Snippets: Printf”

This post is part of the PHP Snippets series where I will be covering the basics of developing in PHP.

Both single and double quotes are supported in PHP, but there is a significant difference in how they are handled.

Single quotes are output “as is” and are the quickest form of quoting. When using single quotes, you would need to concatenate variables with a string to output them:

$fruit = 'apples';

echo 'They drank some juice from ' . $fruit;

Double quotes evaluate variables and many escaped characters. This means you do not need to concatenate variables with the string, but can include them inside the double quoted string:

$fruit = 'apples';

echo "They drank some juice from $fruit";

You can also use curly braces ({} to isolate the variable within the string. When PHP evaluates a string and sees a $ it will take as much of the string as part of the variable name (ending at a space or punctuation), but you can use the curly braces to explicitly set the end of the variable name:

$fruit = 'apple';

echo "They drank some juice from ${fruit}s.";

This post is part of the PHP Snippets series where I will be covering the basics of developing in PHP.

Almost everything you write in PHP ill have an output to the user; the simplest way of doing this is to use the in-built echo function (which you can use with or without parentheses).

The below example is a simple echo to output one line of text:

echo 'Hello world!';

You can output multiple lines of text, which you would do with multiple echo function calls:

echo 'Hello world!<br />';
echo 'This is a simple PHP example.';

Notice though, there is a HTML break line tag <br /> included at the end of the first line; if this wasn’t present, then both lines would be output on the same row.