I can't figure out how to say what I'm talking about which is a big part of why I'm stuck. In PHP I often see code like this html <?php language construct that uses brackets { some code; ?> more html <?php some more code; } ?> rest of html Is there any name for this? Having seen this lead me to try it out so here is a concrete example whose behavior doesn't make sense to me <div id="content"> <ul id="nav"> <?php $path = 'content'; $dir = dir($path); while(false !== ($file = $dir->read())) { if(preg_match('/.+\.txt/i', $file)) { echo "<li>$file</li>"; ?> </ul> <?php echo file_get_contents($path . '/' . $file); } } ?> </div> Which outputs roughly <div><ul><li></li></ul><li></li>...</div> instead of <div><ul><li></li>...</ul></div> which is what I thought would happen and what I want to happen.