Mixing a PHP Variable with a String Literal: A Simplified Approach

In PHP, you can concatenate variables and string literals to create dynamic strings. However, sometimes you may encounter ambiguity when working with interpolated variables within strings.

Consider the following example:

$test = 'cheese';
echo $test . 'y'; // outputs "cheesey"

This works as expected. However, you may prefer a simpler syntax like:

echo "$testy"; // doesn't work

The code above doesn't work because PHP interprets "$testy" as a single string. To overcome this ambiguity, you can use braces to separate the variable from the rest of the string:

echo "{$test}y"; // outputs "cheesey"

The braces instruct PHP to treat "$test" as a separate entity, allowing the variable's value to be interpolated into the string.

Note that this syntax only works with double quotes. Single quotes will not treat the contents of braces as interpolated variables, so the following will output the string "{$test}y" literally:

echo '{$test}y'; // outputs "{$test}y"