Difference between revisions of "PHP-and-MySQL/C2/Variables-in-PHP/English-timed"

|Welcome to a basic tutorial on PHP variables.  

|PHP variables are very easy to use; I'm sure you'll understand them straight away.  

|You don't need to declare them and they're quite easy to write.  

|So there's no need to declare them in a different way each time, or create a value for them each time.  

|So, for example, let's create our PHP tags here and our content goes in between.  

|Okay. Now we start with the dollar sign and then we have our variable name.  

|Please note that you can't start with a "number". So I can't start with a '1'.  

|What I can start with is an "underscore" or a "letter".  

|No other special characters are allowed except underscores, letters and numbers, as long as it doesn't start with a number.  

|So that would be perfectly acceptable here.  

|Okay, so I'll create a variable called "name" and that's going to be equal to a string value contained within double quotes, just like we used for the "echo" function.  

|'My name is Alex'.  

|On the next line, we're going to create another variable using a dollar sign, called 'age'. That's going to be equal to '19', without double quotes.  

|Now the reason for this is that this is an integer.  

|You can use it for decimal values as well. So, this could be '19.5' or nineteen and a half.  

|However, at the moment it's just an integer. That's how I want it - the variable 'name' is a string and the variable 'age' is an integer.  

|Okay so, the thing with variables is that they're very easy to concatenate into a string.  

|In fact, probably, concatenation is the wrong word – they're very easy to include inside your string.  

|If you don't know what concatenation is, it just means to join two things together or to join two strings together in a line.  

|But there is a completely different tutorial on that. So, what I'll say is, for now, you don't need to include this as one of your variables when you're echoing it out.  

|I'll say "My name is" name "and my age is" and put my age down.  

|Now, it's all in one string, all in one echo, and we've just got 'My name is' – plain text.  

|So, we can refresh that and you can see that "My name is Alex".  That's our variable. "and my age is 19" and that's our variable.  

|So they're really easy to put into strings.   

|There are other types of variables, like boolean, decimal – which I've shown you, for example like '19.5'.   

|So practice this and you can come back and learn some more advanced functionality later on, when I'm going through some other projects.