Variable will not echo in one area of webpage

JimmyJames

Hi Everyone,

I am new to the forum. I have been up the last couple nights fighting with what seems to be a simple task and I am having no luck. As I am fairly new to PHP, I figured one of you PHP Gurus out there could point out my mistake.

So I have a PHP page (website contact form). The form starts with the PHP section at the top where I call to some includes such as..

<?php

//page full of static variable I repeatedly use through the page and the site
require_once('./include/variables.php');

//page of functions used for validation in the contact form.
require_once('./include/functions.php');

?>

Then comes the HTML potion of the form ( I wont list it all here, but assume a webpage format). In one of the div's, I have an conditional If/Else statement. It will output/echo if the validation portion of the form has errors. That portion is as follows:

<?php
if (count($errors) > 0){
     echo "<span class=\"redcolor\">There were some errors in the info you tried to submit blah blah blah. Please try the form again blah blah blah. You may also email directly to contact@".$DomainName." if you are unable to use this form. Thank you.</span>";
} 
?>

.... and then of course the rest of the HTML page.

Now the problem seem to lie in the echo where I am concatenating with the variable $DomainName. The error statement echo shows on the screen, but is missing what should be where the variable is. So the output look like this on the screen....... There were some errors in the info you tried to submit blah blah blah. Please try the form again blah blah blah. You may also email directly to contact@ if you are unable to use this form. Thank you.

Now I figured the variable was not setting so I decide to test this by echo'ing the same variable in other parts of the HTML page such as in the meta tag, and image alt tag, and a div on the footer using <?php echo $DomainName; ?>. So I checked the page source in my browser and sure enough, the variable for $DomainName comes up everywhere except in the one echo for my error statement.

I figured it has to be something basic I am missing such as a semicolon, braces, bracket, parentheses or something. However, I am just not getting it. Anyone who can share some thoughts would be great!

anakadote

You're probably correct in assuming that it's a simple mistake, but we will need to see the entire php file (containing your html) to determine what that is.

sneakyimp

try checking immediately before the echo statement :

if (count($errors) > 0){
    echo "domain name is " . $DomainName;
     echo "<span class=\"redcolor\">There were some errors in the info you tried to submit blah blah blah. Please try the form again blah blah blah. You may also email directly to contact@".$DomainName." if you are unable to use this form. Thank you.</span>";
}

If $DomainName is empty, then you might have accidentally set it to empty. This can easily happen when you do something like this:

if ($DomainName = "") { // note that there's only one = sign
}

JimmyJames

Thanks for the feedback guys. I tried doing what sneakyimp referred too as to troubleshoot the problem. I put an echo in different areas or the page to see what section the problem lies.

The problem seems to lie in just the area near the echo. The echo is nested inside some functions (One to Display the form and the other process the form). Nothing inside that area will echo variables defined earlier in the page. Then it hit me BANG, a predefined variable cannot be used inside a function area because it is considered local and not global right?

So does that mean I set the variable $DomainName to global at the top of the page of within the function?

sneakyimp

if $domainName is defined outside the function, then inside the function do this:

function your_func() {
  global $domainName;

  // etc.
}

JimmyJames

Yep, that worked. It's funny how it took me more time for that fix, than it took to create the whole page, form, and logic. I am sure that one will never happen again. Hail to the guru's!

NogDog

Just an FYI: a more re-usable solution (and also less prone to bugs later as the code is updated) is to pass the value as a function parameter rather than using "global", as global tightly couples the function to the code that is using is.

function your_func($domainName)
{
   echo $domainName;
}