<?php $a=1; ?> <?=$a;?> What does <?= mean exactly?
8 Answers
It's a shorthand for <?php echo $a; ?>.
It's enabled by default since 5.4.0 regardless of php.ini settings.
4 Comments
zachdyer
Is it available in php 7?
TwystO
Note that the final semi-colon is not required. But if, for whatever reason, you need to go back to classic tags, a simple project-wide search/replace
<?= for <?php echo would'nt be enough. Anyway as of today I hope you guys doesn't have any production servers running PHP < 5.6 as this versions are not maintained anymore (PHP Supported Versions).
Fatih K.
Important note: php echo shorthand (<?=) is not bound to short_open_tag directive! It can be used even if short_open_tag is disabled. you can't disable echo shorthand (<?=) at anyway.
BalusC
@Fatih: Indeed. That was introduced in 5.4.0. See last paragraph of answer.
It's a shorthand for this:
<?php echo $a; ?> They're called short tags; see example #1 in the documentation.
Comments
Since it wouldn't add any value to repeat that it means echo, I thought you'd like to see what means in PHP exactly:
Array ( [0] => Array ( [0] => 368 // T_OPEN_TAG_WITH_ECHO [1] => <?= [2] => 1 ) [1] => Array ( [0] => 309 // T_VARIABLE [1] => $a [2] => 1 ) [2] => ; // UNKNOWN (because it is optional (ignored)) [3] => Array ( [0] => 369 // T_CLOSE_TAG [1] => ?> [2] => 1 ) ) You can use this code to test it yourself:
$tokens = token_get_all('<?=$a;?>'); print_r($tokens); foreach($tokens as $token){ echo token_name((int) $token[0]), PHP_EOL; } From the List of Parser Tokens, here is what T_OPEN_TAG_WITH_ECHO links to.
1 Comment
user198729
The token failed to tell me more details.
<?= $a ?> is the same as <? echo $a; ?>, just shorthand for convenience.
answered Jan 7, 2010 at 13:09
Jeffrey Aylesworth
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Comments
<?=$a; ?> is a shortcut for:
<?php echo $a; ?> 
Comments
As of PHP 5.4.0, <?= ?> are always available even without the short_open_tag set in php.ini.
Furthermore, as of PHP 7.0, The ASP tags: <%, %> and the script tag <script language="php"> are removed from PHP.
Comments
It's a shortcut for <?php echo $a; ?> if short_open_tags are enabled. Ref: http://php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php
Comments
I hope it doesn't get deprecated. While writing <? blah code ?> is fairly unnecessary and confusable with XHTML, <?= isn't, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately I don't use it, because short_open_tag seems to be disabled more and more.
Update: I do use <?= again now, because it is enabled by default with PHP 5.4.0. See http://php.net/manual/en/language.basic-syntax.phptags.php
;is redundant; as the answers suggest this short-tag expands to anechowith a semicolon added to the end, as per the php documents.