Question

Possible Duplicate:
curly braces in string

I still don’t know what it’s called. Like:

$name = 'xxx';

echo "This is a string {$name}";

What do you call that operation? Concatenating a variable using {} in to a string.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is not concatenation ; this is variable interpolation ; see the Variable parsing section, in the PHP manual.

Basically, you can use any of the two following syntaxes :

echo "This is $variable";

Or :

echo "This is {$variable}";

And you’ll get the same result in both cases — except the second one allows for more complex expressions.

Concatenation would be something like this :

echo "This is my : " . $value;

Where the content of the variable $value is concatenated to the string, using the concatenation operator ..