PHP is an interpreted language, so each time we request a web page, the interpreter searches for each PHP tag and executes the code inside it.
These tags are:
<?php ... ?>
<? ... ?>
<?= ... ?>
When our application contains only PHP code, we can omit the
?>
end tag. This prevents new lines from being added or accidental whitespaces after the PHP closing tag.
<?php
?This is the most common PHP tag. It is used almost everywhere and is used to initialize a PHP code section.
Here is a basic example:
<?php // this tells PHP that the code starts hereecho 'Hello, Educative!';/* here it ends */ ?>
<?
?<?
is a short-form for <?php
and is termed as “short tag”.
It has the same utility as the <?php
tag but its use should be avoided due to compatibility issues. This is because short tags can only be used if they are enabled.
Note: these tags can be disabled in
php.ini
via
Here is an example of using short tags:
<?echo 'Hello, Educative!';?>
<?=
?<?=
is an alias of <?php echo
.
It is a short form that is useful when we need to print something without writing everything each time.
<?= 'Hello, Educative!' ?>
Note: we also omitted the
;
at the end of the string.