Site.php

By way of illustration, we produced a little package to allow a client to search a database of people (see Chapter 13). PHP syntax is not hard and the manual is at http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.mysql.php.The database has two fields: xname and sname.

The first page is called index.html so it gets run automatically and is a standard HTML form: 

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>PHP Test</TITLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>
<form action="lookup.php" method="post">
Look for people. Enter a first name:<BR><BR>
First name:&nbsp <input name="xname" type="text" size=20><BR>
<input type=submit value="Go">
</form>
</BODY>
</HTML>

In the action attribute of the form element, we tell the returning form to run lookup.php. This contains the PHP script, with its interface to MySQL.

The script is as follows:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>PHP Test: lookup</TITLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>
Lookup:
<?php print "You want people called $xname"?><BR>
We have:

<?php
/* connect */
mysql_connect("127.0.0.1","webserv","");
mysql_select_db("people");
/* retrieve */
$query = "select xname,sname from people where xname='$xname'";
$result = mysql_query($query);
/* print */
while(list($xname,$sname)=mysql_fetch_row($result))
	{
	print "<p>$xname, $sname</p>";
}
mysql_free_result($result);
?>

</BODY>
</HTML>

The PHP code comes between the <?php and ?> tags.[1] Comments are enclosed by /* and */, just as with C.

The standard steps have to be taken:

  • Connect to MySQL — on a real site, you would want to arrange a persistent connection to avoid the overhead ...

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