When PHP gets a string with double quotes it decyphers the contents of the string, when it gets single quotes it doesn't bother, just pumps out what came in.
Why is this important?
For one thing the double quote conversion of whatever is inside the quotes to what gets printed only handles simple variables.
If you have an array entity ($array[1]) in there you'll get 'hello Array' out. That's to say that it only looks at the variable, it don't go no further, You can quite conceviably have something horriblew like $array[1][2]->fred[4]->harry->joe, PHP won't go futher than $array[1]
This might seem, at first looks, like a bug or a limitation. It's exactly the opposite!
You should, ideally, never use double quotes. single quote normal strings and just echo, print, whatever, variables by themselves.
The dot operator is your friend when doing this. A dot (full stop, whatever you wanna call it) tacks two strings together.
The best wayt to write the above is ...
echo 'hello ' . $name . '<br>\n';
Avoid double quotes whenever you can, if you think about it the reason is obvious. If PHP is going to convert $namke to Simon if it's in double quotes and not if it's in single quotes then whenever it see's double quotes it's gotta try decoding the string just in case there's a variable in there.
This means your code runs slower, your server has more to do, and the end user has to wait longer to get the page (even if it's only milliseconds)
And before anyone mentions it - yes I'm a creature of (bad) habit, I do what I say you shouldn't - I know I do, it's like smoking, just because I do it doesn't meant that you should!