outputting html

Anon

hi folks...

sorry to be new around here, brb.. but we all gotta start somewhere..

im after a little advice, im getting on grand with the language and all is cool elsewhere, im just a little over my head here i think (im not a trained programmer)..

i read somewhere that you can output files with php, and wondered if this was possible with simple file formats... .txt, .html etc... or whether it was more simple than that..

i was just wondering if anyone knew off-hand...

thx, hope its cool to hang-out here..

swin//

Anon

Yep. HTML is what PHP puts out normally, but it's capable of spitting any file type you like (with the GD-Lib functions you can have a PHP script send out a JPEG or PNG image).

The key feature - the bit that tells the browser what sort of file it's being sent so's it knows how to deal with it - is the Content-Type header field.

To indicate that a PNG file is being sent, start off with
header('Content-Type: image/png');

and a plain text file
header('Content-Type: text/plain');

A zip file is
header('Content-Type: application/x-zip-compressed');

and an MP3 is
header('Content-Type: audio/mpg');

Of course, through all this the URL still refers to the ".php" script generating the output.

Anon

cheers...

thanks very much, thats real handy,
it would appear that there aint nuch it cant do... ??

dang !!

so what would the function be if i wanted to output an html file ?

cheers

swin//

Anon

Well, the MIME type for HTML is "text/html", but that's what the web server would send anyway if nothing else is specified (assuming PHP's been installed properly).

Anon

thanks...

thats helpful.. i'll let you know how i get on...

swin//

Anon

just to say thanks guys..

and post up the code i used in the end.

i like it when theres is sample code, so i guess i'll lead by example.

..brb....

this is what i used - its not complex, just creates an html file that is updatable from a form on another page...

swin//

<?
//set the page variable
$page = "page.html";

// this bit makes sure theres line breaks in the string thats passed from the form
$content = nl2br($content);

//set the string with the variable passed from the form
$code = '<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">


<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<h2><b><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">This is the HTML</font></b> 
</h2>
<h2>&nbsp;</h2>
<h2>'.$content.'</h2>
<h2>&nbsp;</h2>
<h2>more html....</h2>
</body>
';

// this opens the page and declares what your doing with it (whether the file exists or not)
$fp = fopen("$page", "w");
//this does the creating bit - see the manual form good description
fputs($fp, $code, strlen($code));

//this closes the document reference 
fclose($fp);

//this loads the page you just created
header ('location: page.html');