Mixing PHP & HTML (Nice & Clean!!)

justin4480

Hi all

I have experience with php & html, but self taught without knowing best way regarding structure.

I want to discuss the best way to mix php & html. I've always found the below way of embedding php in html works, but looks so messy, and is horrible to navigate through...

<html>
<title>My Title</title>
<body>

<?php
include('include.php');
//... Various php code...
?>

<a href="./page2.php">Add Question</a>
//... Various html code...

<?php
//...more php...
?>

</body>

Is there a better more structured and clean way to go about large projects which require an html frontend with lots of php scripting?

rsmith

Depends on what you're doing. If you writing HTML that is static then your above structure is good. If, say, you were creating a table that was populated based on the number of results in a SQL query, then you would nestle your html into the PHP code like this:

<table>

<?
     while($var){
         echo "<tr>";
         echo "<td>td contents here</td>";
         echo "</tr>";
     }
?>

</table>

Just make sure that if you start putting HTML or other programming languages like JScript in with your PHP, that you escape things properly and pay close attention to syntax.

kterry

I personally find it easier to only embed html that needs to be dynamically generated in my PHP scripts. Anything static I either place outside the scripts or include it kinda like having a template with headers and footers.