Why “\” gives error while storing it in string in PHP?

Question

My string looks like:

$fullPath = $dirName . \"/\" . $file;

If I replace / with \\, it gives error:

Expecting identifier

Answer 1

\ is an escape character. It is a special character used to define either escape sequences or to escape string-delimiters if you want to use them in the string itself.

The correct usage is to escape the escape character like this: \\. This will tell the parser the you wanted the literal backslash and not the special meaning of it.