note 112847 deleted from language.basic-syntax by levim

Note Submitter: Katta ---- I hope di note will help the novice or who is a little bit distracted: When you echo a string with HTML tags within, they will not be shown in output: <?php // This example will print "Hello World", not "<p>Hello World!</p>" echo "<p>Hello World!</p>"; ?> But why? It's really simple: when a PHP function like echo or print is called, its argument is sent to the browser. The browser distinguishes between tags and plain text: the combination of "<" symbol and any latin character is considered as a tag, and everything after it is treated as tag parameter until a ">" symbol is found. <?php // Everything after "<h" is considered as a parameter // This example print "This will be". echo "This will be <h show>" ?> As you should know: - HTML tags make up the web pages structure. - The (X)HTML documents don't show their own structure in normal web pages. That's why HTML tags won't be shown. In order to show HTML tags, you have to use the HTML entity "&lt;", which represent the "<" symbol. Example: <?php // This example will print "<p>Hello World!</p>" echo "&lt;p>Hello World!&lt;/p>"; ?> I tried to be clear as much as possible, sorry for my bad english.