In PHP, strings are concatenated together as follows:
$foo = \"Hello\"; $foo .= \" World\";
Here, $foo becomes \"Hello World\"
$foo
foo="Hello" foo="${foo} World" echo "${foo}" > Hello World
In general to concatenate two variables you can just write them one after another:
a='Hello' b='World' c="${a} ${b}" echo "${c}" > Hello World