Question

A string I’m working with in PHP comes from a text file and the line reads:

<Unknown>

However when I var_dump the array variable associated to this line, it reads

string(9) ""

I’ve inserted the same data <Unknown> before into MySQL and have never had this problem.

Answer 1

That’s because you are var_dumping it and using your web browser to see the output, anything between < and > is regarded as a HTML tag by your browser, thus you see no output but with string(9)

You can try:

echo '<pre>' . print_r($var, 1) . '</pre>';