Question

I’m new to PHP / MySQL and I was just trying to get familiar with it all by following this tut:

http://www.allsyntax.com/tutorials/PHP/24/Building-a-Comments-Script/2.php

…here’s an excerpt from the start of the script:

$inf = "SELECT * FROM `comments` WHERE page = '".stripslashes($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])."' ORDER BY time ASC";
$info = mysql_query($inf);
f(!$info) die(mysql_error());

I understand what this is doing but I wanted to know why the

stripslashes($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])

has dots either side of it?

Answer 1

The period is a String Operator. Specifically, the concatenation operator.

In layman’s terms, it glues strings together.

As you can see in the stripslashes documentation, it is a function that returns a string. So, the code is concatenating the first string "SELECT ..." with the result of the function, followed by the final string " ORDER ...".