December 2005
Beginner
974 pages
31h 50m
English
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PHP
To complete our combo of Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL, we still need the PHP language interpreter. PHP is a recursive acronym that expands to PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It has been in development for several years now; the versions most commonly used are Version 4 and Version 5. We use PHP4 in this chapter, because it was the most often used version at the time of writing. The changes between Versions 4 and 5 are either in underlying implementation or advanced features that will interest you only when you pile up a large number of PHP files.
Some Sample PHP
One of the nice things about PHP is that PHP code can be
entered directly into HTML code. The web server will pass everything
between <?php and ?> to the PHP module, which will
interpret and execute the commands. Here is a very simple example
for some PHP code in an HTML page; if you already have set up PHP,
you could run this directly from your web server (if not, we'll tell
you how to set up PHP shortly):
<html> <body> <?php echo "Hi, "; ?> LAMP enthusiasts. </body> </html>
As you probably already have expected, your browser will output the following text:
Hi, LAMP enthusiasts.
This extremely simple example shows how Apache works together
with the PHP interpreter: the code between <?php and ?> is passed to the PHP interpreter,
which executes the echo command, which in turn
outputs its parameters to the web browser. In addition to this, the
line LAMP enthusiasts is simply added as ordinary HTML text (and since it doesn't have ...