Converting a string into a variable (I think)

[flash-genie]

Hi,

Ive come across a small problem (other than the one that I have no idea what im doing:bemused: )

By adding things to the end of the URL like this

index.php?page=page1

I can get

$page to equal "page1"

Pretty impressive I hear you say, no wait theres more where that comes from.

When i get to my index.php it checks to see if page has been defined by using empty, if its empty then it assigns a value of $page1 to $page.

I then have
$page1="Quite a load of text";

which loads Quite a load of text of text into a <td>

The problem is if $page isnt empty then it kicks out page1 presumably because its a string, how can I convert page1 from a string to a variable?

I would appreciate any help anyone can offer,
thanks,
FG

[Roger_Ramjet]

I absolutely, utterly and completely do not understand a thing you are saying. You seem to be mixing variables and values at will.

$page is a variable name
"page" is a string

Your url passes a variable named $page, which has a value = "page1"
This variable is available to index.php through the session array $GET by coding $GET['page'] which will return the value "page1".
You also have a variable named $page1 ???

Try using unique names that are not also used as values, since you wrote the code you can use any name and value you want. Then maybe someone will understand what you are getting at.

[Megahertza]

I'm just going to add on to what roger said... HUH

If you want php to generate HTML based on a variable pased in the url you should have something like this.

$page = $_GET[page];
if ((empty($page) || ($page == "HOME"))) {include 'home.php';}
if ($page == "LINKS") {include "links.php";}

In english this means,

Get page from the url, if page is empty or non-exist grab the contents of the home.php and place it in this page....

[flash-genie]

OK, thanks for trying to read my post.
Ill try and improve it:

index.php?content=page1

gets brought into my php doc, so now

$contact=page1;

depending on whether $contact has a value of page1, page2, page3 or page4 depends on which content its loads into a certain part of my table.

The actual content variables look something like this at the moment:

$firstPageContent="Quite a lot of text related to page 1";

$secondPageContent="Quite a lot of text related to page 2";

and so on

At the appropriate time in the table I want to be able to say

echo $contentVar;

and it will load the related content, 1 thru to 4 that was in the URL.

---

In my original post I was saying:

$page1="Quite a lot of text related to page 1"; 
$page2="Quite a lot of text related to page 2"; 

and hoping to be able to convert the value of content (page1, page2, page3 or page4 ) into a variable so from for example:

$content=page1;

I could make

$content=$page1;

then later on when I say:

echo $content;

and (depending on which values were passed in the URL) I would get:

Quite a lot of text related to page 1

outputted in my td.

Thanks for your time,
Flash-Genie

[flash-genie]

$page = $_GET[page];
if ((empty($page) || ($page == "HOME"))) {include 'home.php';}
if ($page == "LINKS") {include "links.php";}

In english this means,

Get page from the url, if page is empty or non-exist grab the contents of the home.php and place it in this page.... [/B]

Thanks Megahertza for looking too, that makes sense but surely if I have 30 or so sites then that is going to be a lot of if else statements or case statement? I can see how i could get that snippet you supplied to work for me like this:

$page = $_GET[page];
if ((empty($page) || ($page == "page1"))) {$content=$page1;}
if ($page == "page2") {$content=$page2;}

but isnt there a more dynamic way?

Thanks gain,
FG

[Roger_Ramjet]

Dynamic generation of a variable name during execution?? Not in any programming language that I know of. Not neccessary either. Just code this

$page = $_GET[page]; 
if (empty($page)) {include 'home.php';} 
else {include $page . ".php";}

[flash-genie]

Thanks Roger for looking again.

Thats exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, but I was hoping to be able to avoid lots of little php files which need to be included.

It would however appear that that is the way things are done with PHP?

I was hoping to keep it all in one file as its only about 3 lines of text that differs.

Once again, thanks for your time.

Flash-genie

[Roger_Ramjet]

Not the case. PHP is very flexible and there are always many ways to skin a cat. I assumed that your pages were large and very different. If it is only 2-3 line per then consider a switch statement within the one page: http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.switch.php

Personally, I write single general purpose scripts that call themselves and generate very varied html output according to the parameters passed and the results of db queries. Code fragments like html header, db connect and verify login are included files, and the whole of the rest of a very dynamic site is all one page.

But don't worry about lots of code fragmants in seperate file either. That is one of the beauties of php: there is no file overhead when fragmanting your code as there would be in other languages. Some people find it easier to compartmentalise their code, just as I find it easier to write VB functions to reduce complexity and focus attention on the problem in hand.

Just do whatever you feel most comfortable with.

[wilsonodk]

Originally posted by Roger Ramjet
Dynamic generation of a variable name during execution?? Not in any programming language that I know of. Not neccessary either. Just code this

$page = $_GET[page]; 
if (empty($page)) {include 'home.php';} 
else {include $page . ".php";}

[/B]

PHP supports dynamic variables. Though, I don't think they're needed here.

[Megahertza]

I use coding like this,

$id = $_GET['id'];
$tut = $_GET['tut'];
//- Includes For Main Links - Portal, Links and Tutorials ect -//
if ($id == 1) {include_once 'news.php'; } 
if ($id == 2) {include 'links.php';}
if ($id == 3) {include 'admin.php';}
if ($id == 4) {include 'forum.php';}
if ($id == 7) {include 'profile.php';}
//- Includes For fresh site, runs on all pages under index.php -//
if (empty($_GET['id'])) {include 'news.php';}
//- Includes For the user registration page and user auth -//
if ($id == '6') {include 'users.php';}

I prefer to include files instead of echoing variable contents. This way if I wanted to change the links page I only have to change the links page. I think this is alot better than going through a really big php file and trying to find a variable.

Unfortunetly my mani php file is geting to that stage of being quite big but still its quite manageable

[Roger_Ramjet]

Originally posted by wilsonodk
PHP supports dynamic variables. Though, I don't think they're needed here.

Wow, that's lovely. Good old PHP. I suppose it is possible because php is not compiled, but only interpreted at run-time. Thanks for the link.

[flash-genie]

Thank you all for your replies,

in the end I used a switch statement.

FG

[Roger_Ramjet]

Please mark this thread as resolved then. It is only common courtesy and saves us wasting time opening threads that are finished with.