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<a href="/questions/3737139/reference-what-does-this-symbol-mean-in-php" dir="ltr">Reference — What does this symbol mean in PHP?</a>
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(18 answers)
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<div class="grid--cell mb0 mt8">Closed <span title="2013-11-19 18:48:16Z" class="relativetime">6 years ago</span>.</div>
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I'm following a PHP/AJAX tutorial on form validation. (I'm new to php!).
Could someone explain the syntax of this line:
<?=@$_REQUEST['username']?>
The context is the value attribute of an input field.
I know how $_REQUEST works. I just don't get the <?=@ part. I understand <? can be used in lieu of <?php (but isn't always supported!) and <?=$variable?> is special syntax for echoing variables. What does the @ symbol do?
Thanks.
Links:
Explanation for special syntax
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<?= ?> is the short echo syntax. <?=$var?> is equivalent to <?php echo $var; ?>.
From the PHP manual:
echo also has a shortcut syntax, where you can immediately follow the opening tag with an equals sign. Prior to PHP 5.4.0, this short syntax only works with the short_open_tag configuration setting enabled.
@ is the error suppression operator. When prepended to an expression in PHP, any error messages that might be generated by that expression will be ignored.
In short, <?=@$_REQUEST['username']?> will try to print out the value of $_REQUEST['username'] (without ouputting any errors). It's not a good practice and shouldn't be used in your code. If you don't want to display the errors, turn off display_errors in your php.ini configuration and log them instead.