Where do i save php programs?

In this article, I'll show you how to use PHP code in your HTML pages. It’s aimed at PHP beginners who are trying to strengthen their grip on the world's most popular server-side scripting language.

Table of Contents Show

Learn PHP With a Free Online Course
Different Ways to Combine PHP and HTML
How to Add PHP Tags in Your HTML Page
How to Use PHP Loops in Your HTML Page
How to Use PHP Short Tags
Including Code from Different Files
The Best PHP Scripts on CodeCanyon
Where should PHP files be stored?
How do I store PHP files?
Where do I put PHP files in Windows?
How do I save and run a PHP file?

Again, PHP is a server-side scripting language. That means a PHP script is executed on the server, the output is built on the server, and the result is sent as HTML to the client browser for rendering. It's natural to mix PHP and HTML in a script, but as a beginner, it’s tricky to know how to combine the PHP code with the HTML code.

Learn PHP With a Free Online Course

If you want to learn PHP, check out our free online course on PHP fundamentals! In this course, you'll learn the fundamentals of PHP programming. You'll start with the basics, learning how PHP works and writing simple PHP loops and functions. Then you'll build up to coding classes for simple object-oriented programming (OOP). Along the way, you'll learn all the most important skills for writing apps for the web: you'll get a chance to practice responding to GET and POST requests, parsing JSON, authenticating users, and using a MySQL database.

Today, we’re going to discuss a couple of different ways you could choose from when you want to use PHP in HTML. I assume that you have a working installation of PHP so that you can run the examples provided in this article.

Different Ways to Combine PHP and HTML

Broadly speaking, when it comes to using PHP in HTML, there are two different approaches. The first is to embed the PHP code in your HTML file itself with the .html extension—this requires a special consideration, which we’ll discuss in a moment. The other option, the preferred way, is to combine PHP and HTML tags in .php files.

Since PHP is a server-side scripting language, the code is interpreted and run on the server side. For example, if you add the following code in your index.html file, it won’t run out of the box.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Embed PHP in a .html File</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2><?php echo "Hello World" ?></h2>
</body>
</html>

First of all, don’t worry if you haven’t seen this kind of mixed PHP and HTML code before, as we’ll discuss it in detail throughout this article. The above example outputs the following in your browser:

<?php echo "Hello World" ?>

So as you can see, by default, PHP tags in your .html document are not detected, and they're just considered plain text, outputting without parsing. That's because the server is usually configured to run PHP only for files with the .php extension.

If you want to run your HTML files as PHP, you can tell the server to run your .html files as PHP files, but it's a much better idea to put your mixed PHP and HTML code into a file with the .php extension.

That's what I'll show you in this tutorial.

How to Add PHP Tags in Your HTML Page

When it comes to integrating PHP code with HTML content, you need to enclose the PHP code with the PHP start tag <?php and the PHP end tag ?>. The code wrapped between these two tags is considered to be PHP code, and thus it'll be executed on the server side before the requested file is sent to the client browser.

Let’s have a look at a very simple example, which displays a message using PHP code. Create the index.php file with the following contents under your document root.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>How to put PHP in HTML - Simple Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2><?php echo "This message is from server side." ?></h2>
</body>
</html>

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:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>How to put PHP in HTML- Date Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>This is pure HTML message.</div>
<div>Next, we’ll display today’s date and day by PHP!</div>
<div>
Today’s date is <b><?php echo date('Y/m/d') ?></b> and it’s a <b><?php echo date(‘l’) ?></b> today!
</div>
<div>Again, this is static HTML content.</div>
</body>
</html>

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 <?php and ?> 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.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>How to put PHP in HTML- Date Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>This is pure HTML message.</div>
<div>Next, we’ll display today’s date and day by PHP!</div>
<div>
<?php
echo 'Today’s date is <b>' . date('Y/m/d') . '</b> and it’s a <b>'.date('l').'</b> today!';
?>
</div>
<div>Again, this is static HTML content.</div>
</body>
</html>

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:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>...</title>
</head>
<body>
HTML...
<?php PHP code ... ?>
HTML...
<?php PHP code ... ?>
HTML...  
</body>
</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.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>How to put PHP in HTML - foreach Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
$employees = array(‘John’, ‘Michelle’, ‘Mari’, ‘Luke’, ‘Nellie’);
?>
<h2>List of Employees</h2>
<ul>
<?php foreach ($employees as $employee) { ?>
<li><?php echo $employee ?></li>
<?php }  ?>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

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:

The same example with a while loop looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>How to put PHP in HTML - foreach Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
$employees = array(‘John’, ‘Michelle’, ‘Mari’, ‘Luke’, ‘Nellie’);
$total = count($employees);
?>
<h2>List of Employees</h2>
<ul>
<?php
$i = 0;
?>
<?php while ($i < $total) { ?>
<li><?php echo $employees[$i] ?></li>
<?php  ++$i ?>
<?php }  ?>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

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 <?php as a starting tag everywhere. In fact, PHP comes with a variation, <?=, which you could use as a short-hand syntax when you want to display a string or value of the variable.

Let’s revise the example with the short-hand syntax which we discussed earlier.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>How to put PHP in HTML - Simple Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2><?= "This message is from server side." ?></h2>
</body>
</html>

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.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>How to put PHP in HTML</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>This is pure HTML message.</div>
<div>Next, we’ll display today’s date and day using PHP!</div>

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

<?php
include('header.php');
?>
<div>
<?php
echo 'Today’s date is <b>' . date('Y/m/d') . '</b>!';
?>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Create one more file called day.php and place the following code in it.

<?php
include('header.php');
?>
<div>
<?php
echo 'Today is <b>'.date('l').'</b>!';
?>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Notice that we have included the path to header.php at the top of both day.php and date.php. Make sure that the three files are in the same directory. Opening up date.php in the browser should now show you the following output.

Opening up day.php should show you the following output.

As you can see, the code we put inside header.php was included in both our files. This makes web development much easier when you are working with a lot of files. Just make the changes in one place, and they will be reflected everywhere.

Conclusion

Today, we discussed how you can mix PHP and HTML to create dynamic HTML. We discussed different methods, with a handful of examples to see how things work.

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Software Engineer, FSPL, India

I'm a software engineer by profession, and I've done my engineering in computer science. It's been around 14 years I've been working in the field of website development and open-source technologies. Primarily, I work on PHP and MySQL-based projects and frameworks. Among them, I've worked on web frameworks like CodeIgnitor, Symfony, and Laravel. Apart from that, I've also had the chance to work on different CMS systems like Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress, and e-commerce systems like Magento, OpenCart, WooCommerce, and Drupal Commerce. I also like to attend community tech conferences, and as a part of that, I attended the 2016 Joomla World Conference held in Bangalore (India) and 2018 DrupalCon which was held in Mumbai (India). Apart from this, I like to travel, explore new places, and listen to music!

Where should PHP files be stored?

php. Make sure you save the file to your "server's" document root directory. Typically this is the folder named "htdocs" in your Apache folder on Windows, or /Library/Webserver/Documents on Mac, but can be set by the user manually.

How do I store PHP files?

By following a few simple steps, you can use the TextEdit program to create and save PHP files..

Choose Save from the File menu..

Enter your_file_name. php into the Save As field, being sure to include the . php extension..

Click the Save button..

Where do I put PHP files in Windows?

Install PHP on Windows manually You have to download zipped binary version of PHP from http://www.php.net/downloads.php. Extract the downloaded file to php folder which must be created at the root of any of your windows drives (e.g. c:\php or d:\php). Enter php folder and rename the file php.

How do I save and run a PHP file?

php” file is placed inside the “htdocs” folder. If you want to run it, open any web browser and enter “localhost/demo. php” and press enter. Your program will run.