Messing around with PHP

When it comes to variables, you might be aware of the fact that in PHP, variable names can only start with an underscore _ or a character and there cannot be anything else but yet there is nothing wrong with the code below and it would work just fine.

${'*put whatever you w@nt + in here'} =  'Gotcha!!';
echo ${'*put whatever you w@nt + in here'}; // prints `Gotcha!!`

The reason why it didn't cause any problems is because the afore mentioned rules do not apply to variable variables. However, I would never recommend adopting this approach as it would result in ugly and unmaintainable code.

Another gotcha; while using ternary operators if you avoid the truthy part, it will return the result of the expression on the left side i.e.

$lang = 'PHP';
$lang = $lang ?: 'Javascript';

echo $lang; // prints `PHP`