Introduction to PHP

PHP Origins Rasmus LerdorfRasmus Lerdorf (born Greenland, ed Canada) PHP originally abbreviation for ‘Personal Home Pages’, now ‘PHP Hypertext Processor’ Other key developers: Zeev Surashi and Andi Gutmans (Israel) Open Source PHPPHP version current at UWE Due to upgrade to PHP 5

Scripting languages A scripting language is: –often evolved not designed –cross-platform since interpreter is easy to port –designed to support a specific task – PHP -> Web support –un-typed variables (but values are typed) –implicit variable declaration –implicit type conversion –stored only as script files –compiled on demand –may run on the server (PHP) or the client (Javascript) What design and development are involved in using a scripting language like PHP for development in place of a compiled language (Java in JSP,.NET)?

What is PHP? PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor PHP is a server-side scripting language, like ASP PHP scripts are executed on the server PHP supports many databases (MySQL, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL, Generic ODBC, etc.) PHP is an open source software PHP is free to download and use

PHP files PHP files have a file extension of ".php", ".php3", or ".phtml"

Why PHP? PHP runs on different platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, etc.) PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.) PHP is FREE to download from the official PHP resource: PHP is easy to learn and runs efficiently on the server side

Where to Start? To get access to a web server with PHP support, you can: Install Apache (or IIS) on your own server, install PHP, and MySQL Or find a web hosting plan with PHP and MySQL support

PHP and HTML HTML-embedded –PHP scripts are essentially HTML pages with the occasional section of PHP script. – PHP script is enclosed in the tag pair:

Free format - white space is ignored Statements are terminated by semi-colon ; Statements grouped by { … } Comments begin with // or a set of comments /* */ Assignment is ‘=’: $a=6 Relational operators are, == ( not a single equal) Control structures include if (cond) {..} else { }, while (cond) {.. }, for(sstartcond; increment; endcond) { } Arrays are accessed with [ ] : $x[4] is the 5th element of the array $x – indexes start at 0 Associative Arrays (hash array in Perl, dictionary in Java) are accessed in the same way: $y[“fred”] Functions are called with the name followed by arguments in a fixed order enclosed in ( ) : substr(“fred”,0,2) Case sensitive - $fred is a different variable to $FRED C-like language

Function library Basic tasks –String Handling –Mathematics – random numbers, trig functions.. –Regular Expressions –Date and time handling –File Input and Output And more specific functions for- –Database interaction – MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, Sybase, MSSQL.. –Encryption –Text translation –Spell-checking –Image creation –XML

String Handling String literals (constants) enclosed in double quotes “ ” or single quotes ‘ ’ Within “”, variables are replaced by their value: – called variable interpolation. “My name is $name, I think” Within single quoted strings, interpolation doesn’t occur Strings are concatenated (joined end to end) with the dot operator “key”.”board” == “keyboard” Standard functions exist: strlen(), substr() etc Values of other types can be easily converted to and from strings – numbers implicitly converted to strings in a string context. Regular expressions be used for complex pattern matching.

Learning PHP Start with just the basics, installing a script to output an HTML page Understand how PHP supports interaction with the Browser or other clients Understand how PHP supports integration with databases – MySQL Understand how PHP supports integration with other applications – Web services

Hello world My First PHP Page

Easy to Use Code is embedded into HTML. The PHP code is enclosed in special start and end tags that allow you to jump into and out of "PHP mode". Example

<?php $today_dayofweek = date(“w”); if ($today_dayofweek == 4){ echo “Today is Thursday!”; } else{ echo “Today is not Thursday.”; } ?>

Page counter <?php $COUNTER_FILE = “webcounter.txt"; if (file_exists($COUNTER_FILE)) { $fp = fopen("$COUNTER_FILE", "r+"); flock($fp, 1); $hits = fgets($fp, 4096); $hits += 1; fseek($fp,0); fputs($fp, $hits); flock($fp, 3); fclose($fp); } ?>