When do I use the PHP constant "PHP_EOL"?

When is it a good idea to use PHP_EOL?

I sometimes see this in code samples of PHP. Does this handle DOS/Mac/Unix endline issues?

Yes, PHP_EOL is ostensibly used to find the newline character in a cross-platform-compatible way, so it handles DOS/Unix issues.

Note that PHP_EOL represents the endline character for the current system. For instance, it will not find a Windows endline when executed on a unix-like system.

From main/php.h of PHP version 7.1.1 and version 5.6.30:

#ifdef PHP_WIN32
#   include "tsrm_win32.h"
#   include "win95nt.h"
#   ifdef PHP_EXPORTS
#       define PHPAPI __declspec(dllexport)
#   else
#       define PHPAPI __declspec(dllimport)
#   endif
#   define PHP_DIR_SEPARATOR '\\'
#   define PHP_EOL "\r\n"
#else
#   if defined(__GNUC__) && __GNUC__ >= 4
#       define PHPAPI __attribute__ ((visibility("default")))
#   else
#       define PHPAPI
#   endif
#   define THREAD_LS
#   define PHP_DIR_SEPARATOR '/'
#   define PHP_EOL "\n"
#endif

As you can see PHP_EOL can be "\r\n" (on Windows servers) or "\n" (on anything else). On PHP versions prior 5.4.0RC8, there were a third value possible for PHP_EOL: "\r" (on MacOSX servers). It was wrong and has been fixed on 2012-03-01 with bug 61193.

As others already told you, you can use PHP_EOL in any kind of output (where any of these values are valid - like: HTML, XML, logs...) where you want unified newlines. Keep in mind that it's the server that it's determining the value, not the client. Your Windows visitors will get the value from your Unix server which is inconvenient for them sometimes.

I just wanted to show the possibles values of PHP_EOL backed by the PHP sources since it hasn't been shown here yet...