Syntax
Hello world program in PHP code embedded in HTML code
The PHP interpreter only executes PHP code within its delimiters. Anything outside its delimiters is not processed by PHP (although non-PHP text is still subject to control structures described in PHP code). The most common delimiters are to open and ?> to close PHP sections. delimiters are also available, as are the shortened forms or (which is used to echo back a string or variable) and ?> as well as ASP-style short forms <% or <%= and %>. While short delimiters are used, they make script files less portable as support for them can be disabled in the PHP configuration, and so they are discouraged. The purpose of all these delimiters is to separate PHP code from non-PHP code, including HTML.
The first form of delimiters, and ?>, in XHTML and other XML documents, creates correctly formed XML 'processing instructions'. This means that the resulting mixture of PHP code and other markup in the server-side file is itself well-formed XML.
Variables are prefixed with a dollar symbol, and a type does not need to be specified in advance. Unlike function and class names, variable names are case sensitive. Both double-quoted ("") and heredoc strings provide the ability to interpolate a variable's value into the string. PHP treats newlines as whitespace in the manner of a free-form language (except when inside string quotes), and statements are terminated by a semicolon. PHP has three types of comment syntax: /* */ marks block and inline comments; // as well as # are used for one-line comments. The echo statement is one of several facilities PHP provides to output text, e.g., to a Web browser.
In terms of keywords and language syntax, PHP is similar to most high level languages that follow the C style syntax. if conditions, for and while loops, and function returns are similar in syntax to languages such as C, C++, C#, Java and Perl.
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