Question

I am having issues with my code. I am pretty certain that it is related to quotations. Let me demonstrate.

This works fine:

<?php if ( $is_latest_post ) echo '
hello world
'; ?>

This doesn’t work:

<?php if ( $is_latest_post ) echo '
<a class="recent<?php $category = get_the_category(); echo $category[0]->category_nicename; ?>" href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/<?php echo $category[0]->category_nicename; ?>"><?php echo $category[0]->cat_name; ?></a>
'; ?>

Why doesn’t it work? What can I change to make it function? The a class part of the code works perfectly outside the if ( $is_latest_post ) statement. Appreciate that I have only just started learning coding with PHP.

Answer 1

when you encapsulate strings in single quotes, it treats that string as a literal. PHP will not parse the code you have in that string.

What you need is concatenation. The dot operator . lets you mash several strings together.

<?
if ( $is_latest_post ) {
    $category = get_the_category();
    echo '
    <a class="recent' . $category[0]->category_nicename . '" href="' . bloginfo('url') . '/'. $category[0]->category_nicename . '">' . $category[0]->cat_name . '</a>';
}
?>

You can concatenate arbitrarily many things together.

<?
    $a = 1;
    $b = 2.0;
    $c = 'string';
    $d = function_call();

    $string = $a . $b . 'random text' . $c . $d;

?>