On Wed, 06 Jul 2011 12:56:21 +0100, Stuart Dallas wrote: > My guess is that the preceding $ causes PHP to interpret the next token > "{XYZ}" as a variable or a constant, but without that preceding $ it has > no way to know you're trying to use a constant. As Curtis points out, > the only way to insert a constant into a string is through > concatenation. > > -Stuart OK. I should have made myself clearer - I was making an observation with regards to constant parsing in strings rather than looking for advice. My bad. My third example showed that "{${XYZ}}" would echo the value of the variable called the value of XYZ: <?php define ('XYZ','ABC'); $ABC="huh!"; echo "{${XYZ}}\n"; ?> Output - huh! We could easily re-write the 'echo' line above to be: echo "{${constant('XYZ'}}\n"; But my example shows that PHP *is* accessing the value of a constant without any jiggery-pokery or hacks (e.g. http://www.php.net/manual/en/ language.types.string.php#91628) as it is retrieving the value of ABC from the XYZ constant and then looking for a variable of that name. I admit that I'm no C coder but it may be possible (note, the word "may") that a change of code within the PHP source tree will allow us to use something like echo "{{XYZ}}" to access the constant value. Cheers Dave -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php