Question

I am trying to use PHP to build HTML that I will later display. I have the following lines:

$currentName = "test";
$numberToGiveDropDownHTML = "<Select name='$currentName[]'>\n";

But I get the following error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected
‘]’, expecting T_STRING or T_VARIABLE
or T_NUM_STRING in…

What is wrong with that? I thought I could that and later use the $_POST super global.

Thanks!

Answer 1

PHP will try to parse variables in a double string automatically. Consider the following:

$a = 'foo';
echo "A = $a"; // output: A = foo

PHP will convert $a to foo for you, given it’s in double quotes. In your scenario, it’s thinking (the parser that is) that the [] is part of the in-line variable.

You can do one of two things: use {$currentname} so the parser doesn’t keep going, or break the string out and concatenate the variable in, e.g. ...".$currentname."[]...