In writing PHP code, several characters need to be “escaped” for the code to run properly. If not, the browser will be blank or show errors.
The following characters have to be escaped, which means you write a backslash ( \ ) in front of it.
For example: \- (the hiphen) or \. (the dot).
Other special characters are:
” ^ [ $ ( ) | * + ? { \ ” .
A quick example:
[sourcecode language=’php’]
[/sourcecode]
hi
you said dots need to be escaped, too
but you didn’t escape it in your example
In the example, the ‘ is escaped because otherwise $str would equal ‘It’ and then there would be a bunch of junk code before the next ‘ which would start a new in-code string which would upset the precarious balance of quotations.