PHP is a language that was designed to be easily embedded into HTML pages. Most PHP pages have PHP code and HTML intermixed. When a Web server reads a PHP page, it is looking for two things to let it know it should start reading the page as PHP rather than HTML, the start and end PHP tags: <?php and ?>, respectively.
If you have configured your php.ini file to accept "short tags" (which are enabled by default), then you can use the syntax <? and ?> instead. Additionally, you can configure your php.ini file so that it accepts ASP style tags, <% and %>. This feature is turned off by default, and its only real purpose seems to be to allow certain HTML editors to recognize the in-between code as something other than HTML, in which case the editor won't mangle the code by imposing its own set of HTML syntax rules upon the code.
Get Started:
<h1><? echo “First PHP Page.”; ?>!</h1>
The code above, when viewed via a Web server, simply prints out String enclosed in the quotes.
In general, individual lines of PHP code should end with a semicolon, although it is not necessary to use semicolons if a beginning or an ending bracket is used (this will make sense when you look at if/then statements).
For example:
<?
echo "<p>a line of code";
echo "<p>another line of code;
?>
