Can this be done - opening a variable with one PHP tag, then closing the PHP tag but keeping the variable open so everything beneath becomes the value of the variable? Or is there a limit on PHP variable size / characters?
<?php $content = " ?>
a bunch of content goes here <br />
with lots of HTML tags and JS scripts
<?php "; ?>
Read bout HEREDOC syntax: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php#language.types.string.syntax.heredoc
You can either use HEREDOC/NOWDOC
$content = <<< 'HTML'
a bunch of content goes here <br />
with lots of HTML tags and JS scripts
HTML;
or output buffering, e.g.
<?php ob_start(); ?>
foo
<?php
$var = ob_get_clean();
var_dump($var); // will contain foo and surrounding whitespace
No, but you can probably do some of it with heredoc
$content = <<< END
some content here<br/>
<script type="text/javascript">
alert('hi');
</script>
END;
try:
<?php ob_start (); ?>
.... html
<?
$content = ob_get_clean ();
?>
See http://pl.php.net/manual/en/book.outcontrol.php for details
Yes you can do it.
A closing tag inside double quotes as : " ?>" will not be treated specially. They are just string contents.
is there a limit on PHP variable size / characters?
No. You can stuff as much as you can into a variable till your memory is full.
What your code would do is to store a string starting with ?> and ending with <?php in the variable $content. That's probably not what you want to do? If you later echo such a string, you would most probably get errors due to these php tags.
As mentioned in other answers, heredoc would be a solution but in general you should try to avoid such situations where you have to store very long html sequences in a variable. Rather use a view file and inject some dynamic content there or use some sort of include.
So, depending on what you really want to do,your options are:
$content = "<html>markup here</html>";
$content = 'large amount of text';
or
$content = 'text';
$content .= 'other text';
$content .= 'end text';