mixing PHP + HTML

Anon

I administer several PHP driven sites where I have a template file that includes another file with most of the main content. I pass a variable called $page to determine which main content file to include. Some of the individual content files have just plain HTML and some have HTML and PHP. Each one of these files is called "main_whatever.php" (ie. main_products.php, main_download.php, etc...). All of them have the PHP extension, even the ones with only HTML code. I realize that files without PHP code should be not be named .php so they won't be parsed by the PHP engine. I'm trying to figure out what would be faster. To name all the files .php and suffer a slight hit to parse files that don't have any PHP code...or to run some code like this:

if (file_exists ("main$page.php")) {$include = "main$page.php";}
else {$include = "main_$page.html";}
include ($include);

This would of course incur the overhead of checking the file system for files named main_whatever.php or main_whatever.html.

Which would yeild better performance? Any thoughts?

Anon

Regardless of what the included file is named, if a PHP file includes it, the contents will be parsed by the PHP engine.

jc94062

Instead of using

if (file_exists ("main$page.php")) {$include = "main$page.php";}
else {$include = "main_$page.html";}
include ($include);

Why not stick in a .htaccess file that does the same thing?

DirectoryIndex index.php index.htm index.html

So if index.php exists, thats used, if its not, index.htm is used, if thats not present either, index.html is used.

Anon

that's fine for the main index file (which is the template). But my original post was about the various content files that are included from the index file. The point of this snippet of code was to to differentiate between content files that have HTML and ones that have HTML+PHP. Although I gather this is all a moot point because Steve Yelvington points out that any included file is parsed regardless of it's extension (I still can't find any mention of that in the docs).

Anon

Steve, the manual says:

"When a file is included, parsing drops out of PHP mode and into HTML mode at the beginning of the target file, and resumes again at the end."

So I gather that the file is still parsed regardless of extension?

include ('file.php');
include ('file.txt');

these are both parsed for PHP directives?

Anon

Yes. Despite it being a security hole, some PHP applications writers still use an extension of ".inc" for included library files.

The code:

include('this.wibble');

and the file:

---------this.foo----------
Some non-php stuff
<?php
......blahblah_2......

?>

Is equivalent to:

?>
Some non-php stuff
<?php
......blahblah_2......
?>
<?php