Mac Lab: An Apple Macintosh OS X & Mac / PC Blog

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:

<?php

$str = 'It\'s a nice day today.';
echo $str;

?>