A String variable holds text and numbers. All strings begin with a symbol "$". To assign some text to the string you can use the following code:

Strings are case sensetive so the string variable $Welcome_Text is not the same as $welcome_text A string name can contain letters, underscores and numbers. but it should not begin with a number or underscore. When assigning numbers to the string variables you need not include the quotes so:

We use exactly the same code to display a variable on the screen, as we used to display the text. But slightly different form. The following code would display the welcome text:

As you can see, the only major difference is that you need not put the quotation marks if you are printing a variable.

Output from your PHP programs is quite boring unfortunately. All the content is just output in the browser's default font. It is easy, to format your text using HTML. This is because, as we know that the PHP is a server side scripting language, code is been executed before the page is sent to browser. This means, only the resulting information from script is sent, so in the above example, the browser would just sent the text:

This means, that you can include standard HTML markup in your strings and scripts. The problem with this is that many HTML tags require the " symbol. You may notice that this symbol will clash with the quotation marks used to print the text. To overcome this confusion you must tell the script which quotes to be used (those at the beginning and end of the output) and which to be ignored (those of the HTML code).

To illustrate this let us consider the example, Change the font of the text to the Arial font in red. The code for this is as follows.

As you can see this code contains 4 quotation marks so can confuse the script. To solve this you must add a backslash before each quotation mark to make the PHP script ignore it. Then the code would look like.

Now you can include this in your print statement,which will make the browser display it.