quoting constants in php: “this is a MY_CONSTANT”

Question

I want to use a constant in PHP, but I also want to put it inside double quotes like a variable. Is this at all possible?

define("TESTER", "World!");
echo "Hello, TESTER";

obviously outputs "Hello, TESTER", but what I really want is something like:

$tester = "World!";
echo "Hello, $tester";

outputs "Hello, World!".

Answer 1

Sorry, that's not the way constants in PHP work. You can put variables in double quotes and heredocs but not constants.

Answer 2

I recomend you to use concatenation because:

1. When you use a variable into a double quotes string your visibility is not good;
2. When you use a double quotes string the php can to process slowly;
3. You don't use a constant into a string, because don't have any delimiter to the php knows what is the constant.

Answer 3

Concatenation is the way to go.

Unless you want the hokey, nasty, inefficient, evil monkey way of:

echo preg_replace("/TESTER/",TESTER,$original_content);

Answer 4

no way, unless you write your own string parsing function

Answer 5

I've found that when dot-concatenation of a constant is a problem, using sprintf to get my string is usually the way I want to go in the end.

Answer 6

Alternatively, do

"this is " . MY_CONSTANT

or

"this is " . constant("MY_CONSTANT");