He said, "Hello, my name is Ethan."
He said, "Hello, my name is $name."
The escape slash, or backslash, tells PHP to treat the character that follows it in a special way. In the first example, the backslashes allow double quotation marks to appear inside a double-quoted string without ending the string. Without the escape slash, PHP would interpret the quotation mark as the end of the string and could produce a syntax error. The second example uses single quotes around the entire string, so the double quotation marks inside it do not need to be escaped.