large blocks on html in php

Anon

is there a way like with perl that you call tell php were to start reading a section of text from and where to start ? like say i want to make a whole html pages inside a script, do i have to do echo ""; for every line ?

rrijnders

No:

You can actually do things like these:

======================
<?PHP

print "

  <HEAD>
  <TITLE>My Page</TITLE>
  </HEAD>
  <BODY>
  <H3>Hello World</H3>
  </BODY>
  
";
?>

======================

Note above that the print statement spans many lines. This is acceptable and actually preferable to doing a "print" for every line separately.

Also, instead of printing directly, you can store the HTML in a varable and <i>print</i> the variable at a later time:

======================
<?PHP

$myString "

  <HEAD>
  <TITLE>My Page</TITLE>
  </HEAD>
  <BODY>
  <H3>Hello World</H3>
  <img src=\"my_image.png\">
  </BODY>
  
";

print $myString;

?>

But note this time that quotes in the html have to be escaped with the "\" character. Another caveat is that older versions of PHP on some systems have a limit on the size of a single variable string; somewhere around 1K.

HTH
-- Rich

Anon

You can also use Perlish heredoc syntax.

Perl_ish_ because it's (irritatingly) a little different with its semicolons:

$mystr = <<<EOF
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H3>Hello World</H3>
<img src="my_image.png">
</BODY>
EOF;

And yes, it's three '<' signs.

Of course, if you're not going to do anything with $mystr except print it immediately, the fastest-running approach (though not by much, to be sure) is to just escape out of PHP and emit HTML until you're ready to do some more PHP coding:

...php...
?>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H3>Hello World</H3>
<img src="my_image.png">
</BODY>
<?php
...more php...