A basic example of using PHP variables.
This tutorial will review how to define and use PHP variables when creating HTML output. Here is a basic sample of using a variable and the echo command to create a personalized hello mesage.
<?php $name = 'Jane Doe'; echo '<p>Hello '.$name.'!</p>'; ?>Variables are used to temporary store data and then reference that data later on in your code. For example, a visitor could fill out a contact form, the contact form data is then stored in a series of variables, and then later on could be used to display a personalized message and/or send a personalized email.
There are some rules when naming your variables:
- Variable names start with the
$sign - Variable names must start with a letter or an underscore
- Variable names can contain alpha-numeric characters and underscores
- Variable names are case-sensitive
The goal of this series of lessons is to become comfortable with retrieveing data from a database and displaying the data in a web page. When working with database data the process roughly follows these steps:
- Fetch data from the database.
- Create a loop to iterate through the retrieved data.
- Use if statements to check which data is ready for output.
- Put the data into a series of variables and/or arays.
- Use
echoto output the variables and format them with HTML.
In this lesson we're going to focus on the last step, outputting data using HTML, variables, and the echo statement.
-
Open up a new file and name it variables.php.
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Add the following code to the new PHP file:
<!doctype html> <html> <head> <title>Links and Variables</title> </head> <body> <h1>Links and Variables</h1> <p>Use PHP echo and variables to output the following link information:</p> <hr> <?php $linkName = 'Codecademy'; $linkURL = 'https://www.codecademy.com/'; $linkImage = 'codecademy.png'; $linkDescription = 'Learn to code interactively, for free.'; ?> </body> </html>
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After the variables are defined use a series of
echostatements to display the content. For example outputting the$linknamemight look like this:<?php echo '<h1>'.$linkName.'</h1>'; ?>
Note
Add each value from the array one at a time. Test your PHP after each new line of PHP.
Full tutorial URL:
https://codeadam.ca/learning/php-variables.html
- Visual Studio Code or Brackets (or any code editor)
- Filezilla (or any FTP program)
