CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtml
Jasper
Jasper

Reputation: 243

Using PHP variables inside HTML tags?

I am pretty new to php but I'm stuck on this problem... Say i wait to put a link to another site with a given parameter, how do I do it correclty?

This is what i have now:

<html>
<body>
<?php
  $param = "test";

  echo "<a href="http://www.whatever.com/$param">Click Here</a>;
?>

</body>
</html>

Upvotes: 24

Views: 136652

Answers (7)

nicolaas
nicolaas

Reputation: 1881

Well, for starters, you might not wanna overuse echo, because (as is the problem in your case) you can very easily make mistakes on quotation marks.

This would fix your problem:

echo "<a href=\"http://www.whatever.com/$param\">Click Here</a>";

but you should really do this

<?php
  $param = "test";
?>
<a href="http://www.whatever.com/<?php echo $param; ?>">Click Here</a>

Upvotes: 41

jhyry
jhyry

Reputation: 161

There's a shorthand-type way to do this that I have been using recently. This might need to be configured, but it should work in most mainline PHP installations. If you're storing the link in a PHP variable, you can do it in the following manner based off the OP:

<html>
  <body>
    <?php
      $link = "http://www.google.com";
    ?>
    <a href="<?= $link ?>">Click here to go to Google.</a>
  </body>
</html>

This will evaluate the variable as a string, in essence shorthand for echo $link;

Upvotes: 16

Christian Huber
Christian Huber

Reputation: 818

I recommend using the short ' instead of ". If you do so, you wont longer have to escape the double quote (\").

In that case you would write

echo '<a href="http://www.whatever.com/'. $param .'">Click Here</a>';

But look onto nicolaas' answer "what you really should do" to learn how to produce cleaner code.

Upvotes: 5

TerenceJackson
TerenceJackson

Reputation: 1786

HI Jasper,

you can do this:

<?
sprintf("<a href=\"http://www.whatever.com/%s\">Click Here</a>", $param);
?>

Upvotes: 1

Nick
Nick

Reputation: 6965

You can do it a number of ways, depending on the type of quotes you use:

  • echo "<a href='http://www.whatever.com/$param'>Click here</a>";
  • echo "<a href='http://www.whatever.com/{$param}'>Click here</a>";
  • echo '<a href="http://www.whatever.com/' . $param . '">Click here</a>';
  • echo "<a href=\"http://www.whatever.com/$param\">Click here</a>";

Double quotes allow for variables in the middle of the string, where as single quotes are string literals and, as such, interpret everything as a string of characters -- nothing more -- not even \n will be expanded to mean the new line character, it will just be the characters \ and n in sequence.

You need to be careful about your use of whichever type of quoting you decide. You can't use double quotes inside a double quoted string (as in your example) as you'll be ending the string early, which isn't what you want. You can escape the inner double quotes, however, by adding a backslash.

On a separate note, you might need to be careful about XSS attacks when printing unsafe variables (populated by the user) out to the browser.

Upvotes: 15

Emyr
Emyr

Reputation: 2371

Heredoc may be an option, see example 2 here: http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php

Upvotes: 0

Sean Walsh
Sean Walsh

Reputation: 8344

You can embed a variable into a double quoted string like my first example, or you can use concantenation(the period) like in my second example:

echo "<a href=\"http://www.whatever.com/$param\">Click Here</a>";

echo '<a href="http://www.whatever.com/' . $param . '">Click Here</a>';

Notice that I escaped the double quotes inside my first example using a backslash.

Upvotes: 2

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