php may be you don't know yet

Let us do something more useful now. We are going to check what sort of browser the visitor is using. For that, we check the user agent string the browser sends as part of the HTTP request. This information is stored in a variable. Variables always start with a dollar-sign in PHP. The variable we are interested in right now is $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'].

Let us do something more useful now. We are going to check what sort of browser the visitor is using. For that, we check the user agent string the browser sends as part of the HTTP request. This information is stored in a variable. Variables always start with a dollar-sign in PHP. The variable we are interested in right now is $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'].

Note: $_SERVER is a special reserved PHP variable that contains all web server information. It is known as a superglobal. See the related manual page on superglobals for more information. These special variables were introduced in PHP » 4.1.0. Before this time, we used the older $HTTP_*_VARS arrays instead, such as $HTTP_SERVER_VARS. Although deprecated, these older variables still exist. (See also the note on old code.)

To display this variable, you can simply do:

Example #1 Printing a variable (Array element)

<?phpecho $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];?>

A sample output of this script may be:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

There are many types of variables available in PHP. In the above example we printed an Array element. Arrays can be very useful.

$_SERVER is just one variable that PHP automatically makes available to you. A list can be seen in the Reserved Variables section of the manual or you can get a complete list of them by looking at the output of the phpinfo() function used in the example in the previous section.

You can put multiple PHP statements inside a PHP tag and create little blocks of code that do more than just a single echo. For example, if you want to check for Internet Explorer you can do this:

Example #2 Example using control structures and functions

<?phpif (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE') !== FALSE) {
    echo 'You are using Internet Explorer.<br />';
}?>

A sample output of this script may be:

You are using Internet Explorer.<br />

Here we introduce a couple of new concepts. We have an if statement. If you are familiar with the basic syntax used by the C language, this should look logical to you. Otherwise, you should probably pick up an introductory PHP book and read the first couple of chapters, or read the Language Reference part of the manual.

The second concept we introduced was the strpos() function call. strpos() is a function built into PHP which searches a string for another string. In this case we are looking for 'MSIE' (so-called needle) inside $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] (so-called haystack). If the needle is found inside the haystack, the function returns the position of the needle relative to the start of the haystack. Otherwise, it returns FALSE. If it does not return FALSE, the if expression evaluates to TRUE and the code within its {braces} is executed. Otherwise, the code is not run. Feel free to create similar examples, with if, else, and other functions such as strtoupper() and strlen(). Each related manual page contains examples too. If you are unsure how to use functions, you will want to read both the manual page on how to read a function definition and the section about PHP functions.

We can take this a step further and show how you can jump in and out of PHP mode even in the middle of a PHP block:

Example #3 Mixing both HTML and PHP modes

<?phpif (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE') !== FALSE) {?><h3>strpos() must have returned non-false</h3>
<p>You are using Internet Explorer</p>
<?php} else {?><h3>strpos() must have returned false</h3>
<p>You are not using Internet Explorer</p>
<?php}?>

A sample output of this script may be:

<h3>strpos() must have returned non-false</h3>
<p>You are using Internet Explorer</p>

Instead of using a PHP echo statement to output something, we jumped out of PHP mode and just sent straight HTML. The important and powerful point to note here is that the logical flow of the script remains intact. Only one of the HTML blocks will end up getting sent to the viewer depending on the result of strpos(). In other words, it depends on whether the string MSIE was found or not.

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php syntax

PHP is stand for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.  It is a recursive acronym; the first "P" stands for "PHP," and the first "P" of that stands for "PHP" as well, thus the cycle continues. PHP is a widely used. PHP is general-purpose scripting language. It was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document.
PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line mode performing desired operating system operations and producing program output on its standard output channel, cause it is a general-purpose programming language. It may also function as a graphical application. PHP is available as a processor for most modern web servers and as standalone interpreter on most operating systems and computing platforms.
PHP can be edited by standart text editor. But you need another server in order to connect it. You can try appserv. It's easy one, and portable. You can edit your php everywhere, whenever you need it, as long as you bring your appserv with you.
PHP document start with <?php and ended with ?> . Every PHP command ended with ;. we use <?php as start because it's available in all browser. some time may be you'll find <?, but it's not recomended. When PHP parses a file, it looks for opening and closing tags, which tell PHP to start and stop interpreting the code between them. Parsing in this manner allows PHP to be embedded in all sorts of different documents, as everything outside of a pair of opening and closing tags is ignored by the PHP parser. Most of the time you will see PHP embedded in HTML documents.
A simple example.
<?php
echo 'hallo';
?>
You will see hallo in your browser if succed

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php introduction

PHP is mainly focused on server-side scripting, so you can do anything any other CGI program can do, such as collect form data, generate dynamic page content, or send and receive cookies. But PHP can do much more.
There are three main areas where PHP scripts are used.

* Server-side scripting. This is the most traditional and main target field for PHP. You need three things to make this work. The PHP parser (CGI or server module), a web server and a web browser. You need to run the web server, with a connected PHP installation. You can access the PHP program output with a web browser, viewing the PHP page through the server. All these can run on your home machine if you are just experimenting with PHP programming. See the installation instructions section for more information.
* Command line scripting. You can make a PHP script to run it without any server or browser. You only need the PHP parser to use it this way. This type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple text processing tasks. See the section about Command line usage of PHP for more information.
* Writing desktop applications. PHP is probably not the very best language to create a desktop application with a graphical user interface, but if you know PHP very well, and would like to use some advanced PHP features in your client-side applications you can also use PHP-GTK to write such programs. You also have the ability to write cross-platform applications this way. PHP-GTK is an extension to PHP, not available in the main distribution. If you are interested in PHP-GTK, visit » its own website.

PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS, and probably others. PHP has also support for most of the web servers today. This includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Personal Web Server, Netscape and iPlanet servers, Oreilly Website Pro server, Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd, and many others. For the majority of the servers, PHP has a module, for the others supporting the CGI standard, PHP can work as a CGI processor.

PHP allows you to have the freedom of choosing an operating system and a web server. Furthermore, you also have the choice of using procedural programming or object oriented programming, or a mixture of them. Although not every standard OOP feature is implemented in PHP 4, many code libraries and large applications (including the PEAR library) are written only using OOP code. PHP 5 fixes the OOP related weaknesses of PHP 4, and introduces a complete object model.

PHP's abilities includes outputting images, PDF files and even Flash movies (using libswf and Ming) generated on the fly. You can also output easily any text, such as XHTML and any other XML file. PHP can autogenerate these files, and save them in the file system, instead of printing it out, forming a server-side cache for your dynamic content. With PHP you are not limited to output HTML.

PHP has One of the strongest and most significant features. PHP supports for a wide range of databases. Writing a database-enabled web page is incredibly simple. The following databases are currently supported:

* Adabas D
* dBase
* Empress
* FilePro (read-only)
* Hyperwave
* IBM DB2
* Informix
* Ingres
* InterBase
* FrontBase
* mSQL
* Direct MS-SQL
* MySQL
* ODBC
* Oracle (OCI7 and OCI8)
* Ovrimos
* PostgreSQL
* SQLite
* Solid
* Sybase
* Velocis
* Unix dbm

PHP supports ODBC, the Open Database Connection standard, so you can connect to any other database supporting this world standard. We also have a database abstraction extension (named PDO) allowing you to transparently use any database supported by that extension. Additionally

PHP also has support for talking to other services using protocols such as LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM (on Windows) and countless others. You can also open raw network sockets and interact using any other protocol. PHP has support for the WDDX complex data exchange between virtually all Web programming languages. Talking about interconnection, PHP has support for instantiation of Java objects and using them transparently as PHP objects. You can also use our CORBA extension to access remote objects.

PHP has extremely useful text processing features, from the POSIX Extended or Perl regular expressions to parsing XML documents. For parsing and accessing XML documents, PHP 4 supports the SAX and DOM standards, and you can also use the XSLT extension to transform XML documents. PHP 5 standardizes all the XML extensions on the solid base of libxml2 and extends the feature set adding SimpleXML and XMLReader support.

PHP has many other interesting extensions, the mnoGoSearch search engine functions, the IRC Gateway functions, many compression utilities (gzip, bz2, zip), calendar conversion, translation...

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