Assignment Operator .=

What does this assignment operator in PHP do?


.=

// Example
x.=y

It's concatenation (http://phphowto.blogspot.com/2006/12/concatenate-strings.html).

It does mean the same thing as:

x=x.y


Hope that makes sense.

Uhm.. What does the "dot" thing do? Does it multiply the 2 variables?

The dot is the string concatenation operator. See this page (http://us3.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.string.php) of the PHP documentation for the complete details. The .= is referred to as the "concatenating assignment operator".

Well, it's the shorthand assignment operator.

a.=b is equivalent to a=a.b, similarly]
a+=b is equivalent to a=a+b

(See http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/c-language/c-operators.html =>4. Assignment Operators )

In PHP, period is used for concatenating, joining two strings together.

Consider following example,

$a = "Hello ";
$b = $a . "World!"; // now $b contains "Hello World!"

$a = "Hello ";
$a .= "World!"; // now $a contains "Hello World!"

Hope your doubt has got cleared, refer php.net, great resource for PHP F1
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