PHP echo or print

Within PHP, the echo statement proves instrumental in displaying one or multiple strings or variables, either on the web page or within the console. It is a language construct and not a function, so it can be used without parentheses if you’re just outputting a single string.

Here’s the basic syntax for using echo :

echo "Hello, world!";

This will output the string “Hello, world!” to the web page or console. You can also use variables with echo :

$name = "Alice";
echo "Hello, " . $name . "!";

This will output the string “Hello, Alice!” to the web page or console. Note that we concatenate the variable $name with the string using the period (.) operator.

You can use echo to output HTML code as well:

echo "<h1>Welcome to my website</h1>";

This will output a level 1 heading to the web page. Note that the HTML code must be enclosed in quotes.

echo can also output multiple values separated by commas:

$name = "Alice";
$age = 30;
echo "Name: ", $name, " Age: ", $age;

This will output the string “Name: Alice Age: 30” to the web page or console.

Overall, echo is a powerful and versatile statement in PHP that allows you to output data in many different formats to the web page or console.

In PHP, the print statement is used to output a single string to the web page or console. Like the echo statement, it is also a language construct and not a function.

Here’s the basic syntax for using print:

print "Hello, world!";

This will output the string “Hello, world!” to the web page or console. Note that you can also use parentheses to enclose the string, like this:

print("Hello, world!");

You can use print to output variables as well:

$name = "Alice";
print "Hello, " . $name . "!";

This will output the string “Hello, Alice!” to the web page or console. Note that we concatenate the variable $name with the string using the period (.) operator.

print can also output HTML code:

print "<h1>Welcome to my website</h1>";

This will output a level 1 heading to the web page.

One difference between echo and print is that print always returns a value of 1, whereas echo does not return anything. This means that print can be used as part of an expression, while echo cannot.

For example:

$name = "Alice";
$greeting = print "Hello, " . $name . "!";

In this case, $greeting will be assigned the value 1, because that’s what print returns.

Overall, print is a simple and straightforward statement that is useful for outputting single strings to the web page or console in PHP.

In PHP, you can display the value of a variable using the echo or print statements. Here’s an example of how to display the value of a variable called $name :

$name = "Alice";
echo $name;

This will output the string “Alice” to the web page or console.

You can also display the value of multiple variables:

$name = "Alice";
$age = 30;
echo "Name: " . $name . " Age: " . $age;

This will output the string “Name: Alice Age: 30” to the web page or console.

In addition to echo and print , you can also use the shorthand syntax <?= $variable ?> to display the value of a variable:

$name = "Alice";
?>
<p>Welcome, <?= $name ?>!</p>

This will output the string “<p>Welcome, Alice!</p>” to the web page.

You can also use the var_dump() function to display the type and value of a variable:

$name = "Alice";
var_dump($name);

This will output the string “string(5) “Alice”” to the web page or console. The output shows that $name is a string with a length of 5 characters.

Overall, there are several ways to display variables in PHP, depending on the context and the type of output you want to generate.