Parsing PHP Vars in AS3

Question

I'm pulling in vars from a PHP file into AS3, which im very new at, and having a few general and what i assume easy questions:
first of all, my php looks like this:
<?php
$first="VARDATA";
echo "v1=$first";
?>
my question is, why can't i:  echo"$first"  
i have to: echo "v1=$first"
here's the actionscript pulling in the data, I assume there's a parsing issue perhaps??
var myLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
myLoader.dataFormat = URLLoaderDataFormat.TEXT;
var myRequest:URLRequest=new URLRequest("thefile.php");
    myLoader.load(myRequest);
    myLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE,onCompleteHandler);
    var newValue: String;
    function onCompleteHandler(e:Event):void{
    var newvariable: URLVariables = new URLVariables(e.target.data);
    newValue = newvariable.values;

Answer 1

YOu can echo whatever you like, but chances are you don't want to quote the $first variable like you are doing.
The URLVariables class reads the data in name/value pairs (name=value), which is why you want to send v1=VARDATA