Search wont show on same page - php

Question

I have three files; index.php, searchbar.php and search.php
now when i have search.php show its results on its own page its fine but when i try to include the search page in index.php i get nothing.
so i include the searchbox.php in index.php so i have a search bar, i then search for something and include the search.php page by using the $_GET['p'] on the index.php but the search always come up blank, if i just leave search.php as its own page and dont try to include it then i get my results but id like for them to be included on the page they were searched from.
index.php
<?php
if (isset($_GET['p']) && $_GET['p'] != "") {
$p = $_GET['p'];
if (file_exists('include/'.$p.'.php')) {
#include ('include/'.$p.'.php');
} elseif (!file_exists('include/'.$p.'.php')) {
echo 'Page you are requesting doesn´t exist<br><br>';
}
} else {
#include ('news.php');
}
?>
searchbox.php
<div id="searchwrapper"><form action="?p=search" method="get">
<input type="text" class="searchbox" name="query" value="" id="query"/>
<input type="image" src="search.png" class="searchbox_submit" value="" ALT="Submit Form" id="submit"/>
</form>
</div>
search.php
<?php
include 'connect.php';
$searchTerms = $_GET['query'];
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM misc WHERE itemname LIKE '%$searchTerms%' ORDER BY itemname ");
{
echo "<table border='1' cellpadding='2' cellspacing='0' width=608 id='misc' class='tablesorter'><thead>";
echo "<tr> <th> </th> <th>Item Name</th> <th>Desc.</th></tr></thead><tbody>";
// keeps getting the next row until there are no more to get
while($row = mysql_fetch_array( $query )) {
// Print out the contents of each row into a table
echo "<tr><td width=50>";
echo $row['image'];
echo "</td><td width=150>";
echo $row['itemname'];
echo "</td><td width=250>";
echo $row['desc'];
echo "</td></tr>";
}
echo "</tbody></table>";;
}
if (mysql_num_rows($query) == 0)
{
echo 'No Results';
}
?>

Answer 1

When I reproduced your code, the "p=search" wasn't carrying over. The better way to set it up is to have the action just go to your index.php file and have a hidden input with:
<input type="hidden" name="p" value="search" />
That will work properly for you!

Answer 2

A blank page almost always means you have whitespace after your closing ?>. Remove the closing ?> in index.php and search.php - this will force the preprocessor to dynamically determine EOF, which is exactly what you want (and what nearly every PHP framework/company includes within their coding standards).