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WithoutBook LIVE Mock Interviews PHP Related interview subjects: 20

PHP Interview Questions and Answers

Know the top PHP interview questions and answers for freshers and experienced candidates to prepare for job interviews.

Total 27 questions PHP Interview Questions and Answers

The Best LIVE Mock Interview - You should go through before interview

Know the top PHP interview questions and answers for freshers and experienced candidates to prepare for job interviews.

PHP Interview Questions and Answers

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Freshers / Beginner level questions & answers

Ques 2

Would I use print "$a dollars" or "{$a} dollars" to print out the amount of dollars in this example?

In this example it wouldn't matter, since the variable is all by itself, but if you were to print something like "{$a},000,000 mln dollars", then you definitely need to use the braces.
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Ques 6

Explain the ternary conditional operator in PHP?

Expression preceding the ? is evaluated, if it's true, then the expression preceding the : is executed, otherwise, the expression following : is executed.
E.g $id = isset($_GET['id']) ? $_GET['id'] : false;
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Ques 8

Why doesn't the following code print the newline properly?                 $str = 'Hello, there.nHow are you?
            print $str;
    ?>


Because inside the single quotes the n character is not interpreted as newline, just as a sequence of two characters - and n.
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Ques 9

Would you initialize your strings with single quotes or double quotes?

Since the data inside the single-quoted string is not parsed for variable substitution, it's always a better idea speed-wise to initialize a string with single quotes, unless you specifically need variable substitution.
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Ques 11

I want to combine two variables together:

 $var1 = 'Welcome to '; $var2 = 'TechInterviews.com';
What will work faster? Code sample 1: -
$var 3 = $var1.$var2;
Or code sample 2:
$var3 = "$var1$var2";
Both examples would provide the same result - $var3 equal to "Welcome to TechInterviews.com". However, Code Sample 1 will work significantly faster. Try it out with large sets of data (or via concatenating small sets a million times or so), and you will see that concatenation works significantly faster than variable substitution.
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Ques 12

For printing out strings, there are echo, print and printf. Explain the differences.

echo is the most primitive of them, and just outputs the contents following the construct to the screen. print is also a construct (so parentheses are optional when calling it), but it returns TRUE on successful output and FALSE if it was unable to print out the string. However, you can pass multiple parameters to echo, like:
 <?php echo 'Welcome ', 'to', ' ', 'TechInterviews!'; ?>
and it will output the string "Welcome to TechInterviews!" print does not take multiple parameters. It is also generally argued that echo is faster, but usually the speed advantage is negligible, and might not be there for future versions of PHP. printf  is a function, not a construct, and allows such advantages as formatted output, but it's the slowest way to print out data out of echo, print and printf.
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Intermediate / 1 to 5 years experienced level questions & answers

Ques 13

What's the difference between include and require? -

It's how they handle failures. If the file is not found by require(), it will cause a fatal error and halt the execution of the script. If the file is not found by include(), a warning will be issued, but execution will continue.
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Ques 17

What's the difference between htmlentities() and htmlspecialchars()?

htmlspecialchars only takes care of <, >, single quote ', double quote " and ampersand. htmlentities translates all occurrences of character sequences that have different meaning in HTML.
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Experienced / Expert level questions & answers

Ques 23

How come the code <?php print "Contents: $arr[1]"; ?> works, but <?php print "Contents: $arr[1][2]"; ?> doesn't for two-dimensional array of mine? -

Any time you have an array with more than one dimension, complex parsing syntax is required. print "Contents: {$arr[1][2]}" would've worked.
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Ques 25

I am writing an application in PHP that outputs a printable version of driving directions. It contains some long sentences, and I am a neat freak, and would like to make sure that no line exceeds 50 characters. How do I accomplish that with PHP?

On large strings that need to be formatted according to some length specifications, use wordwrap() or chunk_split().
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Ques 26

What's the difference between md5(), crc32() and sha1() crypto on PHP?

The major difference is the length of the hash generated. CRC32 is, evidently, 32 bits, while sha1() returns a 128 bit value, and md5() returns a 160 bit value. This is important when avoiding collisions.
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Ques 27

So if md5() generates the most secure hash, why would you ever use the less secure crc32() and sha1()?

Crypto usage in PHP is simple, but that doesn't mean it's free. First off, depending on the data that you're encrypting, you might have reasons to store a 32-bit value in the database instead of the 160-bit value to save on space. Second, the more secure the crypto is, the longer is the computation time to deliver the hash value. A high volume site might be significantly slowed down, if frequent md5() generation is required.
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