On Sat, June 2, 2007 3:15 pm, Brian Seymour wrote: > $bar = $foo['$colVal']; // didn't work > $bar = $foo['{$colVal}']; // didn't work > $bar = $foo[$colVal]; // worked > $bar = $foo['id']; // obviously worked > > What I don't understand is why the first or second option didn't work. > > Can anybody shed some light on this? ' is actually easier to explain. ' has only TWO special characters you can embed in it: ' and \ $foo = 'That\'s life!'; $bar = 'The backslash \\ should be escaped, because it\'s special'; You don't HAVE to escape \ with \\ if PHP won't get "confused" by whatever else you have in your string, but it's a Good Idea, imho, to just always escape it, so you understand what the string parser is doing internally. " is a bit more complex. In addition to " and \ being special, exactly parallel to ' and \ inside '', you also have: variables like $foo and 1-D arrays like $foo[id] special control characters like \n \t \r any char you want with octal { and } for some versions (ugh) of PHP There is also heredoc syntax, which is probably best for large chunks of text, in general. Full documentation is here: http://us.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php -- Some people have a "gift" link here. Know what I want? I want you to buy a CD from some indie artist. http://cdbaby.com/browse/from/lynch Yeah, I get a buck. So? -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php