Hello, PHP

PHP scripts begin with the opening tag <?php. Everything after that tag is PHP until the file ends or you close with ?>. For pure PHP files, omit the closing tag so trailing whitespace cannot leak into output.

echo sends text to standard output. echo "hello\n"; prints hello and a newline. Statements end with a semicolon. Double-quoted strings interpolate variables later; for a fixed literal, either quote style works.

Save source as a .php file. From a terminal with PHP installed, run php hello.php to execute on the CLI without a web server. The same file can later run under Apache, nginx+php-fpm, or the built-in server.

php -v prints the engine version. PHP 8.x is the modern introductory target: named arguments and better errors exist, but this track stays on core syntax first.

Misses: writing print("hello") as if it were Python's print with required parentheses style only, forgetting <?php, saving as .html with no engine, or using console.log from JavaScript.

<?php
echo "hello\n";