11.1. Connecting to the Database
The first thing you have to do when working with PHP and PostgreSQL is to connect to the database. Just as when you're working with a file, you need a handle to identify a connection and to interact with it. To generate this handle, you must use pg_connect. pg_connect establishesa connection to the database and returns a database handle. The connect string sent to the database is the same string you'd use in a C program. This is an important point because PHP's PostgreSQL interface is built on C, so the behavior of PHP is easy to understand if you are familiar with the C interface. However, to work with this book, you don't have to be familiar with C.
Let's see how to establish a connection to the database:
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