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PHP

Posted by David Choi
David Choi
8,536 Points

Formatting PHP Output

In the PHP course, the teacher, Alena Holligan, always uses the escape "\n" when making an output to the screen. So, for example, in the video for Foreach-Loops, she writes the code:

    echo $key . ' = ' . $item['title'] . "<br />\n";

However, after experimenting, I found that the formatting on the screen is exactly the same with or without the "\n". Is there a special reason why she uses the escape, or is it just a personal choice?

1 Answer

Jason Anello
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 Points

Hi davidchoi2 ,

The <br> tag is what produces the line breaks when you view the rendered page in your browser.

The \n is for adding line breaks to the source html file that gets sent to the browser.

If you right click your webpage, you should have an option to "View Page Source". This is going to show you all the html that the php script produced and sent to the browser.

Try viewing the page source once with the \n there and then try again without the \n. You should see a difference.

With the line return in the code, you should see all the key/title pairs on their own line. Without the line return, they should all be on one long line.