What does \n in PHP do?

exactiv

Hi.

What does \n in php do?

[PHP]echo "<TR>\n";[/PHP]

Thanks

zAbbo

New Line

seamus

It's a newline character. It means that the next text to be output will start on a new line.

It's not rendered in HTML pages (It's just whitespace), but it's useful for making the outputted HTML code easy to read, for debugging purposes, or perhaps if you want to parse it.

Repli

Echos a new line to the output, so basically when you view the page source after its generated, it will look like

<TR>
etc etc etc

rather than

<TR>etc etc etc

exactiv

Excellent. Thanks for all the replies lads.

Is there a list of these type of characters available somewhere?

seamus

http://ie.php.net/types.string

About halfway down the page.

There may be more.

Caixa

http://us3.php.net/types.string

Scroll down to "Escaped Characters"

smileyrecords

it comes from good all C

i generaly dont use it if outputing to html

print '...some content...<br />';

does the job

a few of my friends are nostalgic about C so they still use it, i see how it could be confusing for beginners

rsynnott

smileyrecords wrote:

it comes from good all C

i generaly dont use it if outputing to html

print '...some content...<br />';

does the job

The raw output must be just lovely. An I hate to think what emails look like... Use \n, it's a good habit.

smileyrecords

u dont have nothing good to say do u?

i dont care what the raw output looks like as long as the webpage itself works and doesnt have bugs and is pixel perfect

xhtml doesnt care how the raw output looks as long as you follow the standard u get no problems

seo-ireland

I'm not sure the search engines wll thank you for bulking out the page size with unnecessary <br/> tags though.

I used to use <br/> a lot in the past but then I discovered the gift from God that is CSS and i have never looked back.

smileyrecords

u right

i only use <br />on articles not for formating the whole site

i relly only on stylesheets myself they are very usefull and mixed with some php its easy enough to make modules and reuse them, its being long since i used tables

one weird sideeffect of completely css site is how they come up in googles cache! ugly

seo-ireland

Google cache matters not, the added respect Google gives to your nice, small, clean pages in terms of rankings does

rsynnott

smileyrecords wrote:

u dont have nothing good to say do u?

i dont care what the raw output looks like as long as the webpage itself works and doesnt have bugs and is pixel perfect

xhtml doesnt care how the raw output looks as long as you follow the standard u get no problems

Good practice never hurt anyone, and if you ultimately ever have to use the same output you're sending to the page in an email or preformatted tag or any number of other things, you'll be glad you did it.

Also, some poorly-written HTTP clients choke on super-long lines.