Can html and php work together?

How to put PHP in HTML - Simple Example

The important thing in the above example is that the PHP code is wrapped by the PHP tags.

The output of the above example looks like this:

And, if you look at the page source, it should look like this:

As you can see, the PHP code is parsed and executed on the server side, and it's merged with HTML before the page is sent to the client browser.

Let’s have a look at another example:

How to put PHP in HTML- Date Example


This is pure HTML message.
Next, we’ll display today’s date and day by PHP!

Today’s date is  and it’s a  today!

Again, this is static HTML content.

This will output the current date and time, so you can use PHP code between the HTML tags to produce dynamic output from the server. It’s important to remember that whenever the page is executed on the server side, all the code between the  tags will be interpreted as PHP, and the output will be embedded with the HTML tags.

In fact, there’s another way you could write the above example, as shown in the following snippet.

How to put PHP in HTML- Date Example


This is pure HTML message.
Next, we’ll display today’s date and day by PHP!



Again, this is static HTML content.

In the above example, we’ve used the concatenation feature of PHP, which allows you to join different strings into one string. And finally, we’ve used the echo construct to display the concatenated string.

The output is the same irrespective of the method you use, as shown in the following screenshot.

And that brings us to another question: which is the best way? Should you use the concatenation feature or insert separate PHP tags between the HTML tags? I would say it really depends—there’s no strict rule that forces you to use one of these methods. Personally, I feel that the placeholder method is more readable compared to the concatenation method.

The overall structure of the PHP page combined with HTML and PHP code should look like this:

...


HTML...

HTML...

HTML...  

In the next section, we’ll see how you could use PHP loops with HTML.

How to Use PHP Loops in Your HTML Page

Iterating through the arrays to produce HTML content is one of the most common tasks you'll encounter while writing PHP scripts. In this section, we’ll see how you could iterate through an array of items and generate output.

In most cases, you’ll need to display array content which you’ve populated from the database or some other sources. In this example, for the sake of simplicity, we’ll initialize the array with different values at the beginning of the script itself.

Go ahead and create a PHP file with the following contents.

How to put PHP in HTML - foreach Example



List of Employees

Firstly, we’ve initialized the array at the beginning of our script. Next, we’ve used the foreach construct to iterate through the array values. And finally, we’ve used the echo construct to display the array element value.

And the output should look like this:

How to put PHP in HTML - foreach Example



List of Employees

And the output will be the same. So that’s how you can use foreach and while loops to generate HTML content based on PHP arrays.

In the next section, we’ll see how you could use PHP short tag syntax.

How to Use PHP Short Tags

In the examples we’ve discussed so far, we’ve used the 

As you can see, we can omit the echo or print construct while displaying a value by using the shorthand syntax. The shorthand syntax is short and readable when you want to display something with echo or print.

So these are different ways you can use to add PHP in HTML content. As a beginner, you can learn from trying different ways to do things, and it's fun too!

Including Code from Different Files

There are a lot of situations where you need to use the same code on multiple pages of a website. One such example would be the header and footer section of a website. These sections usually contain the same HTML throughout the website.

Think of this like moving the common CSS rules of a website into a stylesheet instead of placing them inside the style tags on individual pages.

There are four functions available in PHP to help you include other files within a PHP file. These are include[], include_once[], require[], and require_once[].

The include[] function will include and evaluate the specified file and give you a warning if it cannot find the file. The require[] function does the same thing, but it gives you an error instead of a warning if the file cannot be found.

When working on big projects, you might unintentionally include the same file multiple times. This could cause problems like function redefinition. One way to avoid these issues is to use the include_once[] and require_once[] functions in PHP.

Let's use code from a previous section to show you how to use these functions. I will be using include[] in this example. Create a file called header.php and place the following code inside it.

How to put PHP in HTML


This is pure HTML message.
Next, we’ll display today’s date and day using PHP!

Create another file called date.php and place the following code in it.