[php] How to add newline to generated output string.

I am generating a list with a snippet and I want the code to be generated one item per line in the source code. Currently I have:
<li>object1</li><li>object2</li><li>object3</li><li>object4</li>

But what I want is:
<li>object1</li>
<li>object2</li>
<li>object3</li>
<li>object4</li>

Based on what I read online I should be able to add a \n or a \r to get a newline. But when I ad it to my code it prints the \n rather than the newline. What am I doing wrong?

Here is the output string, I have tried all sorts of ways of adding the \n to the string but it did not work:

You do realize that having the newline will cause IE to add unexpected spacing to the rows...

Besides that... have a read through the php manual http://au3.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php#language.types.string.syntax.double

You do realize that having the newline will cause IE to add unexpected spacing to the rows...

I know, but I need to have the same output as wayfinder which uses the newlines or else the spacing changes between pages. I know that wayfinder can turn off the newlines but all the spacing and alignment is done already and I would need to change several styles, so I thought it would be easier to just add the newline.

Besides that... have a read through the php manual

Already been there, thanks. The only thing that I was able to maybe understand is that I should have double quotes rather than single quotes. Is this what I am missing? But the MODx snippet guidelines tell us not to use double quotes. I will give this a try after lunch. Thanks.

If the string is enclosed in double-quotes ("), PHP understands more escape sequences for special characters:

So I guess it would be like this:

Quote from: dev_cw at Nov 19, 2007, 08:27 AM

But the MODx snippet guidelines tell us not to use double quotes.

Where does it say this? That’s simply inaccurate, or at least misleading. There are many who continue to try and argue that using single-quotes is faster than using double-quotes in PHP, but this is simply not true in most cases, at least not in any reasonably recent version of PHP (4.4+, 5.1+). I’ve tried calculating performance differences between simple and complex strings using both single- and double-quotes and cannot find any consistent differences in the results of the two methods.

There is some debate over whether your PHP code will be processed faster if you use single quotes instead of double quotes when you don’t need to parse any variables or other special code within them. I always use single quotes whenever I don’t need double quotes, but it’s more force of habit than anything else. If you’re going to add a newline character ("\n") then you must use double quotes or it will just print out literally (as you saw).

You can also use single quotes and just add the new line within them, like so:


But I can’t imagine that this would be more efficient than just using double quotes given how short this string is anyway, and that would make your code a little bit more tidy.

It is in the Creating Snippets wiki post, may not be an ’official’ guideline but it seems like one to us folks who are trying to follow ’rules’ and don’t know enough to know better.
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Creating_Snippets#Use_single_quotes_instead_of_double_quotes

Use single quotes instead of double quotes
When you use single quotes, your text is parsed faster by php core.

Double quotes it is, thanks folks, this has been educating as usual.

The only reason I use single-quotes is to save myself the trouble of escaping (and the bigger trouble of forgetting to escape) the double-quote in HTML tags if they are needed:

Double quotes did the trick great. Thanks

I find myself torn between double and single quotes, on one hand no escaping html parameters, but on the other we can embed variables without concatenation.

Not criticizing your thinking, it all depends on what kind of coding you mostly do. I usually find that most of my variables are complex variables, usually from database query results, and have to be concatenated anyway.