PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th Ed-tqw-_darksiderg

Formatting Strings
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Figure 4.2
Using PHP’s nl2br() function improves the display
of long strings within HTML.
Both of these techniques print a string “as is.”You can apply some more sophisticated
formatting using the functions printf() and sprintf().They work basically the same
way, except that printf() prints a formatted string to the browser and sprintf()
returns a formatted string.
If you have previously programmed in C, you will find that these functions are conceptually
similar to the C versions. Be careful, though, because the syntax is not exactly
the same. If you haven’t, they take getting used to but are useful and powerful.
The prototypes for these functions are
string sprintf (string format [, mixed args...])
void printf (string format [, mixed args...])
The first parameter passed to both of these functions is a format string that describes the
basic shape of the output with format codes instead of variables.The other parameters
are variables that will be substituted in to the format string.
For example, using echo, you can use the variables you want to print inline, like this:
echo “Total amount of order is $total.”;
To get the same effect with printf(), you would use
printf (“Total amount of order is %s.”, $total);