newbie needs help

Anon

Hi - I have uploaded a page with this very simple sample code to my ISP's server, which claims to support PHP and certainly supports MySQL. When I load the page, only the following is displayed:

"); ?>

Can anyone recognize what the problem could be? the code is as follows:

<HEAD><TITLE>My First PHP</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<? echo("Hello World!<P>"); ?>
</BODY>

I have tried a number of variations, including :

<?php
$myvar = "Hello" ;
echo ($myvar);
?>

but nothing works as expected. I hope somebody has an idea.

Thanks -
Ann

Anon

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with your script.

I've tried it on one of my servers and it works fine. I'll be willing to bet PHP is not enabled on your server.

Anon

Hmm... well call me a Perl-Creature-of-Habit, but the way I'd do that is...

<TITLE>My First PHP</TITLE>
<BODY>

<?php
echo "Hello world!<P>";
?>

</BODY>

Anon

One way to try is to use "<?PHP" instead of a mere "<?". Another way is to remove the parenteses of your echo. For example, instead of <? echo("Hello World!<P>"); ?>, try <?PHP echo "Hello World!<P>"; ?>.

Anon

Right click on the page delivered and select view source. If you see all your php code in the page, then it is not being interpreted. The extension tells the web server how to interpret it, so try:

.php
.php3
.phtml
.phps

and see what you get for those.

Anon

This did the trick - I needed to use .php3 extension. Thank you (and everyone else - I had tried most of the variations of signifying php that were suggested, but it was helpful anyway!)

I did, however, really want to use php inside of normal .htm files though. Is there a clever way of including the .php3 files that I should know about?

I want to display some database output inside an existing .htm file (and do not want to change the extension because the file is heavily linked to from around the net).

Thanks again guys! :-)
Ann

Anon

There are a few options here.

I'll assume you're running apache, since any other web server is gonna be different enough this advice won't jibe quite right with it.

In apache, there is a file called httpd.conf (and maybe srm.conf and access.conf, like on a redhat box...)

In this file (or it's sister files maybe) there is a line that looks like this:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3

If you change this line to look like this:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .htm

Then .htm files will be processed as php scripts as well. Notice that this costs you enough in processing time to be an issue on some heavily loaded sites, but for most lower volume sites it should be ok.

Also, in the latest PHP I believe you can set the interpretation by directory instead of for the whole site, which might be a good idea if your site is heavily loaded but you still want to interpret php in .htm files.

for IIS, there is a similar setting you can make from a point and click interface, but I don't know where, it's been way too long since I played with NT.