I have a bunch of php files that I want to incorporate html (divs) and css (external stylesheets) elements into.
If any one has any tips / ideas on how to go about doing this I'd love to hear them :)
You could either :
Integrate HTML code in your PHP file,
Or have your PHP script echo the HTML content.
With the first solution, your PHP file could look like this :
<?php
$var = 10;
// some PHP code
?>
<div>
this is some HTML
</div>
<?php
// and some PHP code again
?>
For more informations about this, see the following section of the manual : Escaping from HTML.
While, with the second solution, your PHP file could look like this :
<?php
$var = 10;
// some PHP code
echo '<div>this is some HTML</div>';
// and some PHP code again
?>
Basically, you are free to mix HTML and PHP code in the same PHP script : outside of <?php ... ?> tags, things will not get interpreted as PHP code.
All you need to do is exit php and write html as normal:
<?php
// php code
?>
<div>
<p>Some html</p>
</div>
<?php
// more php code
?>
Take a look at the PHP alternative syntax for control structures. It is often times more comprehensive when you start mixing with plain HTML:
<?php if(...): ?>
<p>paragraph</p>
<?php endif; ?>
Instead of:
<?php if(...) { ?>
<p>paragraph</p>
<?php } ?>
Related
I'm not very experienced at php, so if there's an easy function for this, I'll feel like an idiot.
When coding in PHP, at the point where you need to echo some HTML code, I have found I have either one of two options.
A: echo "<!--html text here-->";
B: echo "\t\t\t<!--html text here-->\n";
If I were to use method A throughout the code, looking at the php code from client side using view-source produces a solid block of code which is difficult to read.
If I were to use method B, it looks fine client-side, but the actual source code looks messy.
Is there anyway to keep both server and client-side appearance clean?
Something like this
<?php
//php code here
?>
//html code
<h3> <?= $justADynamicVariable ?> </h3>
<?php
//continue php code
?>
Un-readable front end code is caused by poor factoring of your PHP code
The wall-of-text issue occurs because your code is messy. You have logic and display code in the same place (evident from the fact that you're echoing HTML from a PHP block) and this will always produce unreadable and ugly code.
Look at Model-View-Controller pattern, and separate out your logic code from your display code. Then, write your display code in a primarily HTML format with some in-line PHP:
<div>
Welcome back <?= $this->username; ?>
</div>
If you're having to echo HTML code from a PHP block, your code is probably factored wrong.
Other useful tricks to produce readable code:
Use alternative PHP control blocks
This:
<div id='somediv'>
<?php if($something): ?>
Some stuff
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
is infinitely more readable than this:
<div id='somediv'>
<?php if($something) { ?>
Some stuff
<?php } ?>
</div>
And it's definitely better than this which is probably what you're using now:
<?php
echo "<div id='somediv'>";
if($something) {
echo "Some stuff";
}
echo "</div>";
?>
You can just close the php tag (?>), write the html block and return to php (
Use a templating engine, like Twig http://twig.sensiolabs.org/ it allows you to separate your logic out of your templates so you can write really easy to markup with simple syntax to drop in dynamic variables.
or
Use a browser like Chrome, which will auto indent your source for you when you use the Web Developer Tools http://discover-devtools.codeschool.com/. You can even copy paste the results really quickly to a new file. In general, it's a bad idea to fret over outputting well spaced html since software can clean it up so easily.
There are lot's of ways to produce html, depending or it's a single line or an entire block of HTML.
The important thing is readability.
echo "<div><p>Hi ".$name."</p></div>";
Isn't unreadable persé, it might be annoying because it won't get highlighted in many IDE's.
This is a good reason to always seperate html and php, meaning always put html parts outside of your php tags.
So you could end your php block before and open it again after :
if(TRUE) {
?>
<div><p>Hi <?php echo $name;?></p></div>
<?php
}
If you have PHP within a large file mostly containing html you are better of using php control blocks:
<!--html text here-->
<?php if(TRUE):?>
<div>
<p>Hello <?php echo $name;?></p>
</div>
</php endif;?>
<!--html text here-->
You could also use heredoc
echo <<<EOD
<div>
<p>This is html</p>
</div>
EOD;
Or output buffering:
ob_start();
?>
<div>
<p>Hello <?php echo $name;?></p>
</div>
<?php
$html = ob_get_clean();
echo $html;
Well most is in the title. I wonder if it's supposed to be that way or i can do the same without an if(1) condition I'm doing this because my website pages are all as php includes.
Thank you all
Answer retained:
Okay basically the way to do it is simply to include('file.php') as it will be considered out of the current <?php ?> environment.
Putting
<?php if(1): ?>
...
<?php endif; ?>
around your HTML code in a PHP file will have no effect on the result. You will still be able to include the file without it.
You can think of it like the "default mode" for a PHP file is that it contains HTML content. You only need to add <?php ?> tags if you want to add PHP code. If you're just putting HTML code in a PHP file, they're unnecessary.
The beauty of PHP is that you can move "in" and "out" of PHP very easily. You can do the following without issues:
<?PHP
if(whatever) {
?>
your HTML
<?php
include('whatever.php');
?>
more HTML
<?PHP
}
?>
To build on Zak's answer:
You can also use PHP to echo out things that aren't PHP... as long as you quote it appropriately.
<?php
//HTML
while ($x < 5) {
echo "<p> this is html that you can wrap with html tags! </p>";
$x++;
}
//Javascript
echo "<script type='text/javascript'>
some javascript code
</script>"
?>
Although, it's less confusing to just end the php tag to keep things separate.
And you can even use php as you want within html or javascript as long as you put the tags, and as long as the file is saved as a .php file (so PHP can be processed on the server).
Ex:
<script type="text/javascript">
//set a javascript image array to a php value
var imgArray = [<?php echo implode(',', getImages()) ?>];
</script>
But if you want to do this the other way around (IE, assign a browser-compiled value, such as a javascript value to a php value), you'll need to use AJAX.
I want to put some procedural stuff like html in a variable;
Normally we do this:
<?php
$my_var = '
<h1>some header</h1>
some text.
';
?>
Now I want it to look like this:
<?php
$my_var = '
?>
<h1>some header</h1>
some text.
<?php
';
?>
So that we open a php code, declare a variable, do some stuff outside php, and then reopen php code and close the var and we get that stuff that is outside php, we get it inside that variable.
Thanks.
<?php
ob_start();
?>
<h1>some header</h1>
some text.
<?php
$my_var = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
echo my_var;
?>
i don't think there is a way because php ignores lines outside the php tags.
if u have the php in a other file user file_get_contents
Please check php heredoc
http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php
Hope it helps
I'm fairly new to PHP. I started learning it like 3 weeks ago. I cannot find the answer to this question on StackOverflow, Google or Youtube. The PHP documentation to this just confuses me. To get on with the question, how does PHP code mixed in with HTML work?
<?php if (something) { ?>
<p>Hello</p>
<?php } ?>
The p element will only display if something has a truthy value, how is this?... I thought for sure that the PHP engine ignored what was going on around the outside of the codeblocks (e.g. <?php ?>) and only parsed what happens on the inside.
The code below gets parsed by the PHP engine normally and sent to the browser without affecting any HTML elements (even though its clearly between 2 code blocks).
<?php echo $something; ?>
<p>Hello</p>
<?php echo $something; ?>
I hope I'm not going to get flamed for asking this question since a lot of people seem to understand how it works in like a tenth of second.
P.S. I asked this question in chat early and thought I understood it correctly but when I went to implement it my mind was still like, how does this work exactly? It just seems like some kind of hack to me.
Easy now. Definitely need a php tutorial for you to start on http://www.tizag.com/phpT/
Here is what your doing:
<?php
//Anything inside me php processes
if($something)
{
echo "<p>something</p>";
}
//About to stop processing in php
?>
<p>Anything outside of the php statement above will just be printed to the dom</p>
Quick Note: It is good practice to separate your PHP from your HTML
<?php if ($something) { ?> <-- where is the other {
<p>Hello</p>
<?php } ?> <-- oh I see it.
In your first example it is indeed true that <p>Hello</p> will be rendered if and only if 'something' returns true.
If you close a php tag with ?> but have an 'unclosed' execution, like if (blah) { ..., the PHP engine understands your desires and does accordingly.
Why?
The PHP engine is kept 'waiting' until the execution is closed with } and then the final result is evaluated and the browser continues on with the lines below.
Obviously if you leave out the final } you will see some errors, which tells you that PHP was expecting you to finish what you started and you did not
Both the php and html are parsed in-line. So, as it moves down your script it will run php scripts within tags, and display html in the order which they are placed. For example:
<? $someVar = "someVar string value"; ?>
<h1>This is a title</h1>
<? if(1 == 1){?>
<p>This paragraph will appear in between the header tags because 1 == 1 is true</p>
<? } ?>
<h3>Another header which will follow the paragraph</h3>
<p>The value of someVar is: <?=$someVar;?></p> // <?= is a short hand for echo
This will show as:
<h1>This is a title</h1>
<p>This paragraph will appear in between the header tags because 1 == 1 is true</p>
<h3>Another header which will follow the paragraph</h3>
<p>The value of someVar is: someVar string value</p>
Basically just think of it as the server reading down your script and parsing whatever it sees as it goes. If there is html, it will display it and if there is php which does some sort of calculation and then spits out html, it will show the spat out html.
You can write php code anywhere in HTML using php code block
<?php echo "whatever " ?>
or
<?php echo "<h1>Here everything will displayed in h1 </h1> "; ?>
and if you use control structure ( if, switch etc.. ) then it will behave like all other languages, means if something is true then it will execute the part written between { }.
so if you write an undefined variable in if condition then it will not execute code block of because undefined variable is treated as false condition .
additionaly you can check any variable value by var_dump($variable)
PHP's Alternative syntax for control structures
<!DOCTYPE html>
...
<div>
<?php if ( the_thing === true ) : ?>
<p>The thing is true! \o/</p>
<?php else if ( the_other_thing === true ) : ?>
<p>The other thing is true! meh</p>
<?php else : ?>
<p>Nothing is true :-(</p>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
...
So, why does this work:
<?php if (condition): ?>
<!--html code here-->
<?php endif; ?>
But not simply this:
<?php
if (condition) { ?>
<!--html code here-->
<?
}
I figured it was just style preference, but I actually can't seem to get it to work the second way. Am I just doing something completely wrong? I can't see the purpose of outputting HTML right in the middle of an if statement if you wanted it to always print.
You need to allow short tag in your php.ini to make <? work
else you have to write <?php } ?>
The second way should work like you described considering you have the closing php tags and < ?php
It does, if you have the right re-opening tag...
<?php
if (condition) { ?>
<!-- html code -->
<?php
}