welcome.php?name=Kevin">

[vivification]

Hi everyone, have just decided to start using PHP. very exciting

I'm going through a few tutorials, on the MySQL website, http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/ddws/17.html and for some reason it's not working in DreamWeaver. Well it understands it - just doesn't work when I load it.

When I try the following:

<A HREF="welcome.php?name=Kevin"> Hi, I'm Kevin! </A>

and name that page 'index.html'

then create another page called welcome.php with the following code;

<?php  echo( "Welcome to our Web site, $name!" );?>

It comes back with the following error:

Notice: Undefined variable: name in c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Kjeldsen\welcome.php on line 1
Welcome to our Web site, !

Can someone PLEASE help me, i'd really appreciate it. I"m soooooooooo stumped. 😕 😕

[bbreslauer]

This is because something called register_globals is turned off. It is good to have this turned off for security reasons (you can read more about this at php.net, which has incredibly useful documentation). What you want to do in order to be able to see your name in that script is to use the $GET[] array to get the variable from the URL. If you replace $name with $GET['name'], it should work.

[vivification]

Hey Buddy, thanks for your help, but this time it did the following:

I edited the welcome.php page, and changed it to

<?php  echo( "Welcome to our Web site, $_GET['name']" );?>

And then launched it in the browswer, and it returned:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE, expecting T_STRING or T_VARIABLE or T_NUM_STRING in c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Kjeldsen\welcome.php on line 1

:queasy:
sniff I dont like PHP.
HTML was so much simpler.

Any idea on what that means? or have I done something wrong?

[bbreslauer]

Oh, ok.

echo is a special type of command that doesn't actually need the parentheses. You should be able to run this as follows:

<?php  echo "Welcome to our Web site, ". $_GET['name'];?> 

In addition to getting rid of the (), you also should end the string, then put a period, and then the variable name. The period is the concatenation operator, which puts two things next to each other in a string, in this case a string and a variable.

PHP is actually very powerful and great to work with, once you learn it. Instead of working with a MySQL tutorial for PHP, I would suggest using the php.net tutorial (http://us2.php.net/tut.php) or one like this (http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/php).