PHP102
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Exercise 2 - First VALID PHP/HTML page
1. Open your preferred editor
2. Code the following exactly - DO NOT CUT AND PASTE - you will not learn by just pasting this.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>My First Valid HTML/PHP page</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
$myname = "Matthew";
echo "Hello - I am ".$myname;
?>
</body>
</html>
3. Save this in your public_html folder as "exercise2.php"
4. Open your preferred browser and point it to http://mi-linux.wlv.ac.uk/~YOURSTUDENTNUMBER/exercise2.php
5. The result should look like the following screenshot - if it does not, take a look at Troubleshooting PHP to help understand common error messages in PHP.
Understanding Exercise 2
As you can see, you can combine HTML and PHP commands in one file, but the file must have a .php extension for it to be handled correctly by the webserver
- The first line contains the DOCTYPE or DTD - see HTML teaching notes for details on this if you're not sure
- <html lang="en">
- this is the start of the HTML file with the language attribute set to English - this is used by some validators
- <head>
- this is the start of the heading section of the webpage, where components such as title, meta tags, and style are defined
- <meta...>
- this line is used by some validators to understand the character set the page has been written in - more information can be found on W3C Validator-Character encoding FAQ or more general information on troubleshooting W3 validator responses can be found at W3C Validator FAQ
- <title...>
- this sets the title of the browser window that the page appears in - a common mistake is to believe this prints out somewhere in the body of a webpage - it does not - look at your window title bar and taskbar for evidence of where this appears
- </head>
- the end of the heading section
- <body>
- the start of the body of the webpage - the visible output shown in a page
- <?php
- these symbol indicates the start of PHP content in your page - everything from this point on is executed by the PHP program
- $myname = "Matthew";
- this creates a variable called "myname" and puts "Matthew" into it.
- echo "Hello - I am ".$myname;
- this prints out the sentence "Hello - I am " and adds the content of the "myname" variable to the end of the sentence
- ?>
- these symbols indicate the end of the PHP code
- </body>
- this indicates the end of the body section of the webpage
- </html>
- this indicates the end of the html/php page
Reuse this page as a template
To save retyping, you should consider copying and pasting this page for your exercises and your assessment - this is a valid framework that you can paste your PHP code into - make sure that any PHP exists between the <? and ?> symbols
Do you understand everything you've done on this page?
If so, take a look at PHP103 - PHP Basics
