I'm reading the PHP manual. I come across a sentence on the manual page(URL : Instruction separation). There is the first paragraph on this page saying :
As in C or Perl, PHP requires instructions to be terminated with a semicolon at the end of each statement. The closing tag of a block of PHP code automatically implies a semicolon; you do not need to have a semicolon terminating the last line of a PHP block. The closing tag for the block will include the immediately trailing newline if one is present.
I understood everything written in the above paragraph except the last highlighted sentence i.e.
The closing tag for the block will include the immediately trailing newline if one is present.
What does this sentence mean? What does this sentence imply?
This sentence has created confusion and doubts in my mind.
- What exactly mean by "Trailing Newline" here?
- Is the meaning of "Trailing Newline", "Line feed", HTML escape sequence character
"\n",<br>same in this context? Or something else? - What exactly does the "trailing newline" mean here? The newline present just before the closing PHP tag (
?>) or the newline present just after the closing PHP tag (?>) ?
Someone please answer all of my questions in simple, lucid and easy to understand language. It would be far better if you explain with some working code example demonstrating this concept.
Note : I've referred the already asked question on stackoverflow about this but its answer is not satisfactory, it's incomplete and vague. So, please don't mark my question as Duplicate of it. Thanks.