Using <<<CON in PHP

Question

What is the effect of the following code:

$page = <<<CON
<p><center>Blah blah blah</center></p>
CON;

What does the <<<CON do?

Answer 1

That's the PHP heredoc operator. Details at this link:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php#language.types.string.syntax.heredoc

Answer 2

This is known as heredoc. It's essentially a way of defining the value of a variable that spans multiple lines, and doesn't require escaping like traditional strings. The "CON" part is merely an identifier that represents the start and end of the value. This can be changed to a more familiar value.

$str = <<<EOD
Example of string
spanning multiple lines
using heredoc syntax.
EOD;