[RESOLVED] Use INCLUDE files in PHP to build HTML?

deputy5211

Greetings all once again.

I currently use two include statements in my html for stock page headers, style sheets, and footers, as follows:

[FONT=Courier New][/FONT]
page-specific html code here in between the includes
[FONT=Courier New][/FONT]

I tried to use this in my sendmail PHP to make the "thank you" page look like the rest of the site. I used statements like:

[FONT=Courier New]print("");[/FONT]

but I got a parsing error.

Any thoughts on this one would be appreciated.

Tony

Houdini

For includes to work they must be in PHP. I am not sure about HTML you can reference a CSS or a JavaScript but with PHP it must be a PHP file. For instance lets say I have all my connection data in the below file;

<?php
$host="localhost";
$user="username";
$password="secret";
$connect=mysql_connect($host.$user,$password)
  or die("could not connect to database server. MySQL said: ".mysql_error());
?>

Then when I need this information to connect to the database I just include it like this;

<?php
include("connect.inc.php");
$db=mysql_select_db("mydatabase",$connect)
  or die("Could not select the database. MySQL said: ".mysql_error());
$query="SELECT * FROM records WHERE user='aUserName';
//...more code
?>

Now the way PHP will see the above is basically

<?php
$host="localhost";
$user="username";
$password="secret";
$connect=mysql_connect($host.$user,$password)
  or die("could not connect to database server. MySQL said: ".mysql_error());
$db=mysql_select_db("mydatabase",$connect)
  or die("Could not select the database. MySQL said: ".mysql_error());
$query="SELECT * FROM records WHERE user='aUserName';
//...more code
?>

deputy5211

Sounds reasonable.

To paraphrase, if I :
(1) rename INCLUDE.INC to INCLUDE.INC.PHP; and
(2) restructure INCLUDE.INC.PHP so that it has "PRINT" statements in it to output the html instead of containing only native html;

I should be good to go, right? Or am I missing the point?

Thank you.
Anthony

bradgrafelman

No need to make it PHP. If include.inc is a file with HTML, just do this:

readfile('include.inc');

Houdini

Hmm, I never really thought about this but you could write the code as below

<?php
//Mostly HTML but might contain PHP variables
//set some short variables from a form
$email=$_POST['email'];
$username=$_POST['username'];
//and so on
?>
<h1>Welcome from So and So website</h1>
<div align="justify"> A whole bunch of html stuff and such as <?php echo $unsername ?>
then more HTML .....
then <?php echo $email ?>

deputy5211

The READFILE method worked perfectly! Thank you.

Thank you, also, Houdini. I will try your approach as well, as I have a derivative script that this may be perfect for.

FWIW, I have been tinkering and trying to get this script to work right and look right. After two days I found this forum, and success was found in just a few posts.

bradgrafelman

Glad you had a good experience at PHPBuilder. Feel free to visit often and spread the word! 😉