String Data Type & Concatenation in PHP

phpString is one of various data types in PHP.  String is nothing more than a collection of letters.  From previous tutorials, we know how to assign a string value to a variable.  To concatenate a raw string to the variable value, we make use of dot (.) in between them.  There are 2 more ways of performing string concatenation apart from this.  First one is, directly placing your variable inside a string and second one is, in-place substitution.  In in-place substitution, we wrap our variable with curly braces.  Example of all 3 ways of string concatenation is given below.  Personally, I prefer concatenation using dot.

<?php

$hello = "Hello ";

//Using dot concatenation 
echo $hello. "World! <br />";

//Directly placing inside a string.
echo "$hello World! <br />";

//Using in-place substitution.
echo "{$hello}World!";


?>

In case, you have 2 variables holding string values and you want to concatenate them, then you can do so using .= operator.  Example is given below.

<?php
 
$hello = "Hello ";
 
$world = "World!";

$hello .= $world;

echo $hello;
 
 
?>