I was not writing these code samples as if they were being run on a web server. I was running the samples from the command line. And the pre tag is for the markdown, not part of the code sample, really. Regardless, I prefer using "\n" (as do the docs at php.net). If one were to paste this code into a PHP page on the server, they would know to change it if they were intending to output the data to the client page.