NYCPHP Meetup

[Paul Houle]

Anirudh Zala wrote:
> #2 When your data is static, use 'single quotes' to tell PHP to use it "as it 
> is", if dynamic then should not be enclosed by ANY quote.
>
> #3 If you have mixture of static+dynamic then use $dynamic.'I am static' style 
> to concat dynamic and static data.
>   
    If I wanted to code like that,  I'd be coding in Java.

    I did a long stint of programming in Perl,  which offers you about 
30,000 ways to quote text.

    Here are my rules for PHP.

    (1) Use ?>...some HTML...<?php as much as feasible
    (2) Avoid heredoc -- it's particularly treacherous in PHP
    (3) Use " in most situations.  Use \ to escape ", $ and \.
    (4) Make a habit of writing {$like_this}

    Convention (3) turns out to be an effective convention 
cross-language.  Double quotes work the same way in shell scripts,  perl 
scripts and other places.  It might not be the most elegant syntax, but 
it works well.