December 2002
Intermediate to advanced
588 pages
25h 57m
English
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Site.php
By way of illustration, we produced a little package to allow a client to search a database of people (see Chapter 13). PHP syntax is not hard and the manual is at http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.mysql.php.The database has two fields: xname and sname.
The first page is called index.html so it gets run automatically and is a standard HTML form:
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>PHP Test</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <form action="lookup.php" method="post"> Look for people. Enter a first name:<BR><BR> First name:  <input name="xname" type="text" size=20><BR> <input type=submit value="Go"> </form> </BODY> </HTML>
In the action attribute of the form element, we tell the returning form to run lookup.php. This contains the PHP script, with its interface to MySQL.
The script is as follows:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>PHP Test: lookup</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Lookup:
<?php print "You want people called $xname"?><BR>
We have:
<?php
/* connect */
mysql_connect("127.0.0.1","webserv","");
mysql_select_db("people");
/* retrieve */
$query = "select xname,sname from people where xname='$xname'";
$result = mysql_query($query);
/* print */
while(list($xname,$sname)=mysql_fetch_row($result))
{
print "<p>$xname, $sname</p>";
}
mysql_free_result($result);
?>
</BODY>
</HTML>The PHP code comes between the <?php and
?> tags.[1] Comments are enclosed
by /* and */, just as with C.
The standard steps have to be taken:
Connect to MySQL — on a real site, you would want to arrange a persistent connection to avoid the overhead ...