Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS, 2nd Edition

Incorporating PHP Within HTML

By default, PHP documents end with the extension .php. When a web server encounters this extension in a requested file, it automatically passes it to the PHP processor. Of course, web servers are highly configurable, and some web developers choose to force files ending with .htm or .html to also get parsed by the PHP processor, usually because they want to hide the fact that they are using PHP.

Your PHP program is responsible for passing back a clean file suitable for display in a web browser. At its very simplest, a PHP document will output only HTML. To prove this, you can take any normal HTML document, such as an index.html file, and save it as index.php; it will display identically to the original.

Calling the PHP Parser

To trigger the PHP commands, you need to learn a new tag. The first part is:

<?php

The first thing you may notice is that the tag has not been closed. This is because entire sections of PHP can be placed inside this tag, and they finish only when the closing part, which looks like this, is encountered:

?>

A small PHP “Hello World” program might look like Example 3-1.

Example 3-1. Invoking PHP

<?php
echo "Hello world";
?>

The way you use this tag is quite flexible. Some programmers open the tag at the start of a document and close it right at the end, outputting any HTML directly from PHP commands.

Others, however, choose to insert only the smallest possible fragments of PHP within these tags wherever dynamic scripting is required, leaving ...