Best Practices: working with long, multiline strings in PHP?

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You should use heredoc or nowdoc.

$var = "some text";
$text = <<<EOT
  Place your text between the EOT. It's
  the delimiter that ends the text
  of your multiline string.
  $var
EOT;

The difference between heredoc and nowdoc is that PHP code embedded in a heredoc gets executed, while PHP code in nowdoc will be printed out as is.

$var = "foo";
$text = <<<'EOT'
  My $var
EOT;

In this case $text will have the value "My $var", not "My foo".

Notes:

  • Before the closing EOT; there should be no spaces or tabs. otherwise you will get an error.
  • The string/tag (EOT) that enclose the text is arbitrary, that is, one can use other strings, e.g. <<<FOO and FOO;
  • EOT : End of transmission, EOD: End of data. [Q]

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