What does it means with $this-&gt

Apparently the entity name has been transformed in my first sentence by Experts-Exchanges. The first sentence of my comment was:

"& g t ;" is the entity name of the "greater-than" character (http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp).

Hi fcardinaux and angellll:

Thanks a lot for your reply. You give me the answer.

Would you give me some more info if you know?
\
Do you know why people write code in that way, instead explicitly writing $this->?

Is there anything wrong when writing $this->?

Thanks a lot,

Somits

>Is there anything wrong when writing $this->?
no. I prefer to use it, that way it's clearer when reading the code that you refer explicitly to a class variable/function.

Nobody writes code in this way. You're probably viewing it on a website that does something wrong with character escaping functions (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php). It happens if you call the escaping function twice on the same string:

$var = '>';

// First time (correct)
$var = htmlspecialchars($var);
echo $var;   // Will send '& gt;' to the browser, which will display > on the webpage

// Second time (one time too many)
$var = htmlspecialchars($var);
echo $var;   // Will send '& amp;gt;' to the browser, which will display '& gt;' on the webpage

Hi angellll and fcardinaux:

Thanks so much for your help.

It's clear to me now.

Somits