Beginner PHP Tutorial - 9 - echo Video Lecture | PHP for Absolute Beginners: From Novice to PHP Master - Web Development

okay I'm Alex from PHP academy' and this
is a video tutorial created for the new
Boston this video tutorial is going to
be on PHP echo now echo is a language
construct within PHP that allows us to
output data or string data if you like
to the users browser now you can see at
the moment I've got a file open in my
text editor this is a index.php so we've
used a PHP file extension and we've set
up our PHP tags they're going to let us
enter our commands if you like within
them and in this video we're going to be
focusing on the echo to echo language
construct so I've got the page open in
my browser or nearly the page open in my
browser so now I'm doing index dot PHP
you can see at the moment obviously
there it there's nothing there's nothing
on the page because we haven't started
writing now echo is like I said a
language construct it's not a function
it allows you to basically output to the
screen into the browser so how do we
write this where it's simply just echo
we can either use double quotation marks
or we can use single quotation marks and
you'll learn about later on why you
should use them and when you should use
them basically double quotation marks
allow you to echo out variables inside
them if you've program before you'll
know what variables are however single
quotation marks will only let your echo
variables if you append them and we
append with a full stop but obviously
this tutorial is on echo so we're not
going to go too much into detail
remember your line terminator at the end
you need a semicolon at the end of your
line otherwise we're going to run into n
some errors in fact what we'll do is
we'll show that without that so we can
see what the error is like in the
browser so I just want to say hello
world and if i refresh this in my
browser you're going to see that we're
going to
well actually we haven't got an error
and the reason for this is that we don't
have any other lines in the program but
let's for example create a new new line
here and and just say let's just say
hello hello again and let's refresh and
you can see that we've got a parse error
now it says we're expecting either a
comma or a semicolon on the end of line
three
so line three is here the reason for
this is it's expecting it just before
this e and so just before this e is in
fact the end of this line we add our
semicolon in and we're working again so
this is basically how to output data to
the screen let's just refresh you can
see hello well there again like I said
before if you do use double quotation
marks this is absolutely fine it doesn't
make a difference or produce exactly the
same output so within these tags walk
within these these quotation marks what
can we actually do now we can also echo
our HTML to the page because as we echo
out is rendered as as you would find an
HTML page if we put things like a strong
tags for example around this you can see
that when we refresh it's taken that
into account and we've made this text
now bold you can also you could
potentially create a whole HTML document
inside an echo inside a language
construct echo language construct inside
these speech marks if you like however
we tend not to do this we tend to just
echo out what we need I mean things like
strong tags for bold italics underline
sometimes even form data is okay but
later on in the series you'll you'll
learn that you know there are other ways
to handle this but for now that's
basically how you would output data to
your browser