Last night, I was helping my wife with some PHP code for an email form. To create the email message, I had her use a heredoc, which is a convenient way to put a large block of text into a variable, while interpolating other variables into it. But it was giving us errors. What we discovered is that you can’t do this:
$message = <<<MSG
Hello $postvars['FirstName']
MSG;
Even though heredocs can accept other complex variable substitutions, like $var->foo[1], it seems that the quoting on the index messes with the interpolation. So you have to use a more explicit syntax to help PHP figure out where the variables start and end:
$message = <<<MSG
Hello {$postvars['FirstName']}
MSG;
Of course, this doesn’t just apply to heredocs, it applies to any interpolated (e.g., double-quoted) string in PHP.
I’m posting this as a future reference for myself, and for anyone else who might run across this problem in the future.
3 Comments
Thanks! I just drop the index quoting, likeso:
Hello $postvars[FirstName]
…which is not the best. I’ll start encapsulating in braces, now.
Right, that will work, but it’s deprecated. I haven’t checked, but it might not work anymore in PHP 5 (unless the symbol inside the brackets is already defined as a constant).
yes PHP yearns to be as unpredictable as Perl.
::little face of pathetic amusement::