How PHP and HTML Interact together
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PHP and HTML interact in a way that allows PHP to generate dynamic HTML content. PHP is a server-side language, which means PHP scripts run on the web server before any output is sent to the user’s web browser.
Here’s a general flow of how PHP and HTML interact:
- A user makes a request for a PHP page from their browser.
- The request is sent to the server hosting the website.
- The server sees that the requested file is a PHP file and processes any PHP code in the file. This PHP code can perform various tasks, such as retrieving data from a database or processing form data.
- The PHP interpreter processes the PHP code and outputs HTML.
- This HTML output is then sent back to the user’s browser.
- The user’s browser receives the HTML and displays it to the user.
An example of a PHP script embedded in HTML:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<h1>My first PHP page</h1>
<?php
echo "Hello World!";
?>
</body>
</html>
In this example, the PHP echo statement is used to output the text “Hello World!”. The PHP code is processed on the server, and the result (“Hello World!”) is inserted into the resulting HTML before it’s sent to the browser.
It’s important to note that once the server has processed the PHP and sent the HTML to the browser, the PHP code itself is not visible or accessible to the user. When viewing the page source in the browser, you will only see the resulting HTML, not the PHP code that generated it.
Remember that PHP files should be saved with a .php extension so that the server knows to process any PHP code within. Also, PHP code must be enclosed in PHP tags <?php // code here ?> for it to be recognized and processed by the PHP interpreter.