PHP Include Tutorial

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Full Tutorial List           Tutorials (50)       Sept 01, 2009

What is a PHP include file:


Basically a php include file allows you to separate your content out, for example at www.beginner-tutorials.com our side menu is an include file.  This allows us to easily update our content when we have a new set of tutorials.  Some examples of include files could be

  • header.php
  • footer.php
  • menu.php
  • content.php

In PHP the include takes a file name and simply inserts that file's contents into the script that issued the include command.


Ok so let have a look at the code required to use the include function
The first way to include a file is using the include function. This is a PHP built in code and the syntax is the following:

include ( filename )


Lets have a look at a real world example like used in www.beginner-tutorials.com where our side menu contains a list of the following tutorials

 

In this example we created a common menu file that all our web pages use, this file is called menu.php.  In this file we added the following code.

<ul class="sidemenu">
<li><a href="index.php">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="html-tutorials.php">Learn HTML</a></li>
<li><a href="php-tutorials.php">Learn PHP</a></li>
<li><a href="java-tutorials.php">Learn JAVA</a></li>
<li><a href="photoshop-tutorials.php">Learn Photoshop</a></li>
<li><a href="c++-tutorials.php">Learn C++</a></li>
<li><a href="perl-tutorials.php">Learn Perl</a></li>
<li><a href="javascript-tutorials.php">Learn JavaScript</a></li>
<li><a href="unix-tutorials.php">Learn Unix</a></li>
</ul>

To include the file in all our php pages we need to add the following code to all our php pages

<?php include("menu.php"); ?>

For example in our index.php we add the following line of code

<html><head><title>example of include</title></head>
<body>
			<?php include("menu.php"); ?>
</body>
</html>

Result after uploading both the files test2.php and menu.php to your server.

 

Thats It.


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