What role does the backslash "\" play in protecting special characters, such as variables, in PHP strings?

In PHP, the backslash "\" is used as an escape character to protect special characters, such as variables, within strings. When you want to include a special character that might otherwise be misinterpreted by PHP, you can use the backslash to indicate that the following character should be treated as a literal character and not as a special character. 

$name = "John";
echo "Hello, \$name!"; // Output: Hello, $name!

Keywords

backslash escape character special characters variables PHP strings

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