Chapter 8. Web Basics
Introduction
Web programming is probably why youâre reading this book. Itâs why the first version of PHP was written and what continues to make it so popular today. With PHP, itâs easy to write dynamic web programs that do almost anything. Other chapters cover various PHP capabilities, like graphics, regular expressions, database access, and file I/O. These capabilities are all part of web programming, but this chapter focuses on some web-specific concepts and organizational topics that will make your web programming stronger.
Recipes 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 show how to set, read, and delete cookies. A cookie is a small text string that the server instructs the browser to send along with requests the browser makes. Normally, HTTP requests arenât âstatefulâ; each request canât be connected to a previous one. A cookie, however, can link different requests by the same user. This makes it easier to build features such as shopping carts or to keep track of a userâs search history.
Recipe 8.4 shows how to redirect
users to a different web page than the one they requested. Discovering
the features of a userâs browser is shown in Recipe 8.5. Recipe 8.6 shows the details of constructing a
URL that includes a get
query string,
including proper encoding of special characters and handling of HTML
entities. Similarly, Recipe 8.7 provides
information on reading the data submitted in the body of a post
request. Recipe 8.8 discusses a common web formatting ...
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