Beginner PHP Tutorial - 11 - Output HTML Using echo/print Video Lecture | PHP for Absolute Beginners: From Novice to PHP Master - Web Development

hello this is Alex from PHP academy' de
org and in this PHP tutorial for the new
Boston I am going to be showing you how
to echo HTML out to a page so we already
know how to echo data it's just
basically echoing out whatever string
data we want and this will produce the
result here now what happens if we want
to echo out some HTML data let's say I
want to echo out an input text for a
form so normally this would be done
outside our PHP tags and we have input
type equals and we'd have two double
quotes and this will be text because
I've name equals let's just say name and
value equals at the moment we can just
say Alex although this can be used as
specified so we don't really need this
now as this stands this is going to
produce this result we've got just a
simple text area here we can type text
in here simple now what happens if I
want to somewhere in a PHP program when
we develop into more advanced PHP
programs or code rather I want to echo
this out inside here now you saw in my
previous examples that I could use
double quotation marks and this produces
a result similar to this okay so it
works now let's just say I want to put
this straight into here now you think
well it's just going to echo echo the
text out that's absolutely fine it's
going to process this as HTML as we've
already seen
now let's refresh you can see that we've
received this past error and it's saying
expecting a comma or a semicolon on line
two so if we go over to line two we can
see it is indeed this line here and we
it doesn't tell us where we're expecting
a semicolon necessarily within but we
are in fact expecting it here and the
reason we're expecting it in this
position
is because this has told us that we're
ending our echo output and the reason
for this is because we've started with
double quotation marks this appears to
be ending with double quotation marks
now there are a few resolutions in order
to to correct this we can in fact use
single quotes inside a double quoted
echo output so we're using double quotes
on the outside here and then what we can
do is we can use single quotes on the
inside which will still correctly be
processed by HTML so if we refresh that
we get exactly the same result as we did
beforehand now this in fact is by
standards incorrect we want to use
double quotation marks wherever possible
so how can we resolve this if we need to
use double quotation marks inside now
there are one of two ways the first way
to do this is to change the double
quotation marks on the outside of your
string to single quotation marks and you
can see that if i refresh we don't
produce any error so this has worked
also using double single quotation marks
is a lot quicker so we're processing
this whole line a lot quicker than we
would be if we were using double
quotation marks and the reason for this
is using double quotation marks it's
looking for variables inside and
generally it is just a tiny bit slower
and so if you can imagine you've got a
long program that you're racking out a
lot of data try a new single quotation
marks and you're going to speed up your
script
more than significantly so there is
another option if you must use double
quotation marks on the outside for any
reason and we can use a specific
character to escape another character
and in PHP this is a backslash so if I
was to create a backslash here and a
backslash here a backslash here and a
backslash here you can already see that
there's a pattern emerging
we're escaping this character this
character this character and this
character so any character after this is
going to escape it and what I mean by
this is it's going to it's going to tell
PHP
that we want to process this not as
anything within PHP but we want to
process this as something in an output
so let's refresh the page and see what
happens you can see this worked so we
can even just to test that it's
definitely working add in a value to
this form field of Alex inside this box
so we refresh and we see that that's
updated absolutely fine so that's just a
short and sharp way of learning how to
echo HTML inside obviously when you get
to more complex programs and you're
using lots of double quotation marks and
you're echoing out maybe a bit more HTML
data which isn't recommended anyway but
if you must then it's probably better to
just use your single quotation marks in
the outside and then there's no need for
these escaping characters to appear
within okay so that's basically it on
echoing HTML inside PHP