Distributed

We use quotation marks to indicate the start and end of a string. The quotation marks tell the computer that we want everything inside them to be treated as a single piece of data. But how do we include quotation marks inside a string?

Consider the following string: "She said "hi" to the dog."

In the code above, the quotes around “hi” are intended to be part of the string, but the computer will actually see two strings "She said " and " to the dog." with hi in between. Since hi won’t be recognized as valid PHP it will result in an error:

In order to indicate which quotation marks the computer should view as instructions vs which it should view as simply characters, PHP allows for escape sequences. An escape sequence usually consists of a backslash (\) immediately followed by another character.

Quotation marks aren’t the only symbol requiring an escape sequence. When we print multiple strings, PHP will print them to the same line by default:

The code above will output 1. Go to gym2. Cook dinner. To print the second string on a new line, we can use the newline escape sequence (\n):