How do I hide the echo result from showing up on HTML? - php

Question

For Instance consider this standard database connection php file.
db_conn.php
<?php
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "root";
$password = "Yash123";
// Create connection
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password);
// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}
echo "Connected successfully";
?>
If connected successfully it is shows that result onto the website.
What I'd need it to do is not show up on the html but be there in the file so I can test the file executing in the CLI(Command Line Interface) of PHP.
I am using require_once(); in the index file.

Answer 1

uncomment the echo line. or use php's error_log('Connected Successfully');. this would log that the connection was successful. This would hide output from your html and log the string passed as parameter to your error_log file

Answer 2

One could easily dispense with the echo statement and instead return the connection object upon success. This would entail revising the OP code so that it becomes the contents of a database connect function. This idea I gleaned from binpress.com and include suggestions from the Manual, too:
<?php
/* Assuming that user name,password and database name are
credentials that come from a file outside of the
document root for security. */
function db_connect() {
static $conn;
$servername = "localhost";
if ( !isset( $conn ) ) {
// load and parse file containing credentials:
$config = parse_ini_file('../config.ini');
// Create connection
$conn = new mysqli( $servername, $config['username'],$config['password'],
$config['dbname']);
// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
die('Connect Error (' . $conn->connect_errno . ') '
. $conn->connect_error);
}
// Connected successfully
return $conn;
}