How to deal with this HTML code echoed with PHP which as both single and double quotes?

Question

I\'m not sure if this is a cleaner way of writing this, but I think I don\'t have problems here:

Answer 1

There are a lot of ways to escape content:

$a = 5;
$b = array(3);

// Single quotes treats the insides as you type it, except for a few like 
// double-backslash (which makes a backslash) or backslash apostrophe, which 
// allows a single apostrophe, so including a dollar sign inside will actually
// print it out to screen
$content = 'This will print a literal dollar sign followed by an "a": $a'; // $a
$content = 'This will print a backslash and a literal dollar sign followed by an "a": \$a'; // \$a

// However, variables inside double quotes get resolved with their variable values, 
// unless you have preceded the dollar sign with a backslash to let it be treated 
// as a literal dollar
$content = "This will include the value of  variable \$a, as it is looking for a variable: $a"; // 5
$content = "This will print a literal dollar sign followed by an \"a\" because we have backslash-escaped it: \$a"; // $a

// For cases where you need to use brackets with your variable and you wish to transclude
// the content, you need to enclose the variable inside curly braces. This helps PHP know 
// that the variable has actually ended, and that you didn't want to actually print the 
// bracket afterward
$content = 'This will print a literal dollar sign followed by an "a" and enclosed in braces: {$a}'; // {$a}
$content = "This will include the value of variable \$a, as it is looking for a variable: {$a}"; // 5
$content = 'This will print a literal dollar sign followed by an "a" and brackets and enclosed in braces: {$b[0]}'; // {$b[0]}
$content = "This will include the value of variable \$a, as it is looking for a variable: {$b[0]}"; // 3

...and in HTML (or XML, including true XHTML), you can also do escaping; you can use the escapes no matter whether there are single or double quotes in the HTML:

Helpful for quotation marks used inside quotation marks:

Helpful for apostrophes inside apostrophes:

Notice that the hexadecimal tends to be more useful as it is also used in JavaScript:

var content = '\u0027'; // '

and CSS

p:before {content: '\27'} /* ' */

In JavaScript, double-quotes or single quotes have the same meaning (except for fact you need to backslash-escape a different character).

In CSS it is the same, but backslashes are different in that they are typically expected to be followed by a hex Unicode sequence (or another backslash) and are ignored otherwise.

In JavaScript (as with double quotes in PHP), the backslash may have special meaning in escaping other sequences such as '\n' or another backslash, but is ignored otherwise.

You can find these for looking up the "Unicode codepoint" for any character, not just for punctuation, but also for any character in any script. These are usually expressed like U+00A0 or U+0027 (note that it can include letters A-F too). Rarely, they can require 6 digits (or a combination of 2 four digit ones), but usually 4 is sufficient.