For some reason I am unable to print this string: 'ggukjbgfjI:2<EiK6'. There is no escape for "<" that I am aware of.
<?php
$x = 'ggukjbgfjI:2<';
$y = 'EiK6';
$z = 'ggukjbgfjI:2<EiK6';
echo $x;
echo $y;
echo "<br><br>";
echo $z;
?>
1 Answer
If you view page source in your browser, you will see that your code actually outputs:
ggukjbgfjI:2<EiK6<br><br>ggukjbgfjI:2<EiK6
But in the browser you only see:
ggukjbgfjI:2
ggukjbgfjI:2
So what gives? This is because < is the opening character of an <html> tag, meaning that the browser is parsing everything inside it as HTML code until it meets a > character.
The solution to this, is to encode the < as an HTML entity, ie. <
So if you have the code:
$x = 'ggukjbgfjI:2<';
$y = 'EiK6';
$z = 'ggukjbgfjI:2<EiK6';
echo $x;
echo $y;
echo "<br><br>";
echo $z;
It will output, as you'd expect:
ggukjbgfjI:2<EiK6
ggukjbgfjI:2<EiK6
There is also a built in PHP function htmlspecialchars to encode special characters for you automatically, so that your output won't be confused with any special HTML characters. Eg:
$x = 'ggukjbgfjI:2<';
$y = 'EiK6';
$z = 'ggukjbgfjI:2<EiK6';
echo htmlspecialchars($x);
echo htmlspecialchars($y);
echo "<br><br>";
echo htmlspecialchars($z);
echo htmlspecialchars($z);.