Once we’ve declared a variable and assigned a value to it, we can use it as many times as we want. We refer to a variable by using the dollar sign followed by the variable’s name.
$favorite_food = "Red curry with eggplant, green beans, and peanuts"; echo $favorite_food; // Prints: Red curry with eggplant, green beans, and peanuts
Except during assignment, whenever the computer sees a variable in your code, it replaces the variable with the value assigned to that variable.
$dog_name = "Tadpole"; echo $dog_name; // Prints: Tadpole
Since the computer treats a variable just as if it were the value it holds, this means we can do operations on variables just as we would with any value of that type.
$dog_name = "Tadpole"; echo "My dog is named " . $dog_name; // Prints: My dog is named Tadpole
In the code above, we concatenated the string "My dog is named "
to the value held by the $dog_name
variable ("Tadpole"
). Let’s look at another example that uses multiple variables:
$dog_name = "Tadpole"; $favorite_food = "salmon"; $color = "brown"; echo "I have a " . $color . " dog named " . $dog_name . " and her favorite food is " . $favorite_food . "."; // Prints: I have a brown dog named Tadpole and her favorite food is salmon.
Let’s use some variables!
Instructions
You’re going to create a couple variables. The variable, $name
, should be assigned your name as a string. The second,$language
, should be assigned a string value representing a language you’re learning.
Use echo
to print any string you’d like with the $name
variable concatenated to it.
Use echo
to print a string starting with a newline (\n
) with $language
variable concatenated to it.