Assignment Operator .=

[mpacaon]

What does this assignment operator in PHP do?

PHP Code:

.=

// Example
x.=y 


[rangana]

It's concatenation.

It does mean the same thing as:

PHP Code:

x=x.y 


Hope that makes sense.

[mpacaon]

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

[djm0219]

The dot is the string concatenation operator. See this page of the PHP documentation for the complete details. The .= is referred to as the "concatenating assignment operator".

[abduraooft]

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-...operators.html =>4. Assignment Operators )

[ssonawa]

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