AllenEllis/php-include.md

## php-include.md

      
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              php-include.md
            
          
    PHP: introduction to include();

For PHP code to execute, two things have to happen:

The filename needs to end in .php
The PHP code needs to exist between an opening PHP tag <?php and, optionally, a closing PHP tag ?>

Original code

Contents of index.html:
<html>
  <head>
    <!-- header content here -->
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Page name</h1>
    <p>Page content</p>
    <footer>
      <p>Contact info here</p>
    </footer>
  </body>
</html>
To seperate this out, we should consider which code we want to duplicate across every page, and move those over to separate files. We can make a new directory to hold those.
Before: directory structure

index.html

After: directory structure

index.php
templates/
 - header.php
 - footer.php

Revised code

The contents of index.php change to:
<?php
  include("templates/header.php");
?>
    <h1>Page name</h1>
    <p>Page content</p>

<?php
  include("templates/footer.php");
?>
New file: templates/header.php
<html>
  <head>
    <!-- header content here -->
  </head>
  <body>
New file: templates/footer.php
    <footer>
      <p>Contact info here</p>
    </footer>
  </body>
</html>