Concatenation and Combining Strings in PHP

How to combine two or more strings into one big string in PHP.

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By. Jacob

Edited: 2021-02-10 15:44

PHP tutorial

A common desire of a PHP developer is to combine several strings so they become one string. In programming, this is also known as string concatenation.

To concatenate a string in PHP, we will usually be using (.) periods. While generally easy, it gets harder when you want to use a mix of functions and strings. Using a function in a concatenated string allows us to use the function-output in-place, without first having to assign it to a variable.

Note. It is a good practice to avoid using extra variables that are not needed by the application.

The below is a very simple string, assembled using dots (periods):

$name = 'Quackmore Duck';
echo 'My name is ' . $name . ' and I am the father to Donald Duck.';

The same approach works when concatenating variables:

$name = 'Quackmore Duck';
$output = 'My name is ' . $name . ' and I am the father to Donald Duck.';
echo $output;

This is the preferred approach to concatenation.

String concatenation with echo

When echo'ing content, we could also use a comma as separator. Personally, I hate this, because it just adds another way of doing the same thing, and the same syntax can not be used for variables.

echo 'This ', 'is a', ' concatenated string';

However, if we tried concatenating a variable:

$name = 'Rasmus Lerdorf';
$output = 'My name is ', $name, ' and I am the inventor of PHP.';
echo $output;

This would just result in a parse error:

PHP Parse error:  syntax error, unexpected ',' in /var/www/string_concatenation.php on line 3

Concatenation with functions

Using functions mixed with other functions or strings is also possible using the same syntax:

echo 'Today\'s date is: ' . date('Y-m-d H:i:s') . ' and the sun is shining.';

You can also concatenate multiple functions next to each other:

echo 'This is the date: ' . date('Y') . date('m') . date('d');

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