Variables
A variable is an area of memory which is set aside to store information , this is assigned an identifier by the programmer . You can recognise variables in PHP because they are prefixed with the dollar ( $ ) sign . To assign a variable you use the assignment operator ( = ) . Here is an example of this.
$name = "iain hendry";
$intDaysInWeek = 7;
In the first example the variable identifier in this example is $name and the string value "iain hendry" has been assigned to it . In the second example the variable identifier is $intDaysInWeek and the number 7 is assigned to it . Note that in the number example we do not surround the variable with quotes in this way PHP treats this as a numeric value but if we had put quotes round it then PHP would have treated it as a string.
Variable Naming
There are some guidelines to follow for naming variables in PHP and these are as follows .
1. All variable names must begin with a letter or underscore character .
2 . The name of the variable can be made up of numbers , letters , underscores but you cant use charcters like + , - , & , £ , * , etc
One important thing to note if you are coming from another programming language there is no size limit for variables .
Case Sensitivity
One thing that causes many hours of hair pulling and anguish is case sensitivity , PHP is case sensitive (some languages are not) . Here is an example of what I mean.
<?php
$myname = "Iain Hendry";
echo $Myname";
?>
Now we all know what we want to do , declare a variable , assign it the value of "Iain Hendry" and then print this on the screen but in this example we have mis-spelt the variable name , when run the following error is displayed on the screen.
Warning: Undefined variable: Myname in D:\testsample.php on line 3
Example
Using your favourite HTML editor enter the following
<?php
$url = "http://www.myscripting.com";
$rank = 1;
echo "Our favourite site is ".$url;
echo "<br>";
echo "It is number ".$rank;
?>
here is the output you should get
Our favourite site is http://www.myscripting.com
It is number 1
In part 2 we will look at Data types , Type casting
Part 2
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