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List of Names
Short Form
Full Form
-
PHP
- Language type:
- Description:
PHP is an interpreted
server-side scripting language for
web servers. It was designed to support
simple, fast server-side extension for web
development. The syntax of PHP is fairly
simple, and very similar to that of Perl,
with some aspects of Bourne shell,
Javascript, and C .
Variables in PHP are weakly types, the
language does not support strong typing.
PHP supports the a modest complement of
primitive data types: integers, floats,
and strings. It also supports heterogenous
multi-dimensional associative arrays, with
very convenient syntax. PHP offers some
object-oriented functionality, allowing the
programmer to define classes with
member variables and methods, and to use
simple inheritance. The language includes
an extensive set of operators and
built-in functions for manipulating
strings, numbers, and arrays.
Control structures supported in PHP
include simple conditionals, plus several
kinds of bounded and unbounded loops.
PHP does not support any kind of
module or library structure, but it
does permit simple file inclusion
(similar to C's #include directive).
In addition to its basic web functionality,
PHP is supported by extensive libraries
that provide database interfaces and
interaction with many common web data
formats.
There is only one implementation of series
of PHP implementations, as of late 1999 the
current version was 3.0, with 4.0 in beta.
PHP is free, distributed as source code,
and runs on
Unix, Linux, and Windows.
- Origin:
- See Also:
- Remarks:
Designed for web usage, PHP code is
normally embedded in HTML (or XML)
documents. There are several embedding
methods, but all of them share the
same fundamental code structure. Single
statements cannot span separate
embeddings. Statements are normally
separated with a semicolon, but the end
of an embedding also implies the end of
a statements.
Like most web scripting languages,
PHP supports control structures that span
embedding blocks; this allows the web
page designer to apply code conditionals
and loops to parts of the page content.
PHP supports the comment syntax of C, C ,
and Unix Shell.
Documentation about PHP is easy to
obtain on the WWW.
The next version of PHP is being written
with an embeddable scripting engine called
Zend.
- Links:
-
- Date:
- Sample code:
An example of printing the contents of
a mySQL database table, by Yahav Boaz.
<?
mysql_connect("localhost","","") or die("Unable to connect to SQL server");
@mysql_select_db("php3") or die("Unable to select database");
$result = mysql_query("select * from customerTable limit 100");
?>
<table border="1">
<tr>
<?
while ($field=mysql_fetch_field($result)) {
echo "<th>";
echo "$field->name";
echo "</th>";
}
echo "</tr>";
while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($result)) {
echo "<tr>";
for ($i=0; $i<mysql_num_fields($result); $i ) {
echo "<td>";
echo "$row[$i]";
echo "</td>";
}
echo "</tr>\n";
}
echo "</table>";
Descriptions in this dictionary are ©1997-99 Neal Ziring. Some
examples copyright of their respective authors. Some
technologies and languages are trademarked. Permission to
copy descriptions is granted as long as authorship credit is preserved.
Comments on this dictionary, corrections and suggestions, are all welcome.
Please use email, the address is ziring@home.com
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Dictionary and script maintained by Neal Ziring, last major modifications 3/18/98. Most recent
additions to dictionary and master list, 1/00.