I hope this helps, I am fairly new to php myself, but have figured out a lot of it. The curly brackets. i.e. {}, are used to delimit parts of your code. They mark starting and stopping points for actions in if then statements.
example:
if (foo){
echo'bar';
}else{
echo'foo';}
So in this sense it is used thusly if some condition is met, then some action must be followed, and that action is the code contained in the curly brackets, if that condition is not met then the action is the code in the curly brackets below the else statement.
Another use of the curly brackets is to delimit functions.
example:
function foobar($foo, $bar)
{
if($foo == $bar){
$foobar = true;
return $foobar;
}else{
$foobar = false;
return $foobar;}
}
There you see a simple function that you can call to tell if two variables are equal or not. Obviously more indepth checks can be done, but this shows how the curly brackets are mainly used.
As for the single and double quotes those are quite useful.
Single quotes mark the beginning and end of a pure string. they can be used like this
example:
echo'hello world';
No php parsing is done to strings contained in a set of single quotes, so you must concatenate with a period to include variables into the echo function like this.
$world = 'world';
echo'hello ' . $world;
The result would be the same, as the previous echo statement.
Lastly I get to the double quotes, double quotes denote a string with php variables in it. Therefore you can take the previous script and modify it like this
example:
$world = 'world';
echo"hello $world";
This works because the double quotes indicate that php needs to parse the string before it is used. However it should be noted that this is more system intensive than concatenation and is useful, but be careful.
I hope this helps :)
Sincerley
Moo
