Escaping double quotes (PHP)

Question

I want to escape double quotes from this string:

<li><a href="the_permalink()">the_title()</a></li>

The following works fine:

echo '<li><a href="';
echo the_permalink();
echo '">';
echo the_title();
echo '</a></li>';

... but how do I get them all in one single statement?

Thanks

Answer 1

printf( '<li><a href="%s">%s</a></li>', the_permalink(), the_title() );

Answer 2

Using concatenation (line breaks not required):

echo '<li><a href="'
 . the_permalink()
 . '">'
 . the_title()
 . '</a></li>';

Answer 3

echo "<li><a href=".the_permalink().">".the_title()."</a></li>";

Answer 4

echo '<li><a href="', the_permalink(), '">', the_title(), '</a></li>';

Answer 5

The reason you are having problems is because the_permalink() and the_title() are echoing functions. Instead use get_permalink() and $post->post_title. Remember get_permalink() requires the post id ($post->ID) as a parameter.

This explains why the second example works in your initial question. If you call an echoing function from within a string, the echo will output before the end of the string.

So this:

echo 'static content '.echoing_function().' more static content';

will not work as expected, instead, it will output this:

*echoing_function output* static content more static content

In PHP you can use both single and double quotes. When I am building strings with HTML I generally begin the string with a single quote, that way, I can use HTML-compatible double quotes within the string without escaping.

So to round it up, it would look something like:

echo '<li><a href="'.get_permalink($post->ID).'">'.$post->post_title.'</a></li>';

Or as you originally requested, to simply escape them, put a backslash before the quote. Like so (the single quotes have been removed)

echo "<li><a href=\"".get_permalink($post->ID)."\">".$post->post_title."</a></li>";

This is of course assuming you are calling this from within the loop, otherwise a bit more than this would be required to get the desired output.