I'm writing a small website that has multiple pages. I'd like to have the same footers on each page, but I don't want to manually update 10 pages of HTML everyday. I'd like to put a PHP call to an external file in each HTML page (now .php pages, thanks to @br14np) so that when I update the PHP file, all the pages - when loaded - will show the same footer text.
<p><?php footertext.php ?></p>
is my wild guess at loading the content in the file of the afformentioned name but to no avail. (In footertext.php the code is: <?php print("Test numba one") ?>).
How can I go about doing this? I'd prefer an answer involving PHP.
UPDATE:
This is the exact code I'm using. Everything is in the same directory.
Main File:
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<p> Content: <?php include "footertext.php ?></p>
</body>
</html>
Footer Content:
echo 'Test numba TWO!';
Use the include function. Just give it the path to your file. Example:
<?php include "footertext.php"; ?>
There are a few other functions that do similar things, such as require_once(). You can read more about that here.
Response to update
You're missing closing quotation marks after "footertext.php. Another tip that may help this situation is to turn on php error reporting. This will display any syntax or other errors on your page. Just insert the following code at the very top of your pages:
<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set("display_errors", 1);
?>
Also make sure you have opening and closing php tags (<?php ... ?>) in your footertext.php file.
The best fit solution for your query is include or require functions of php. now you need to identify which one out of those are your choices based on their functional behavior.
In PHP, you can insert the content of one PHP file into another PHP file before the server executes it.
The include and require statements are used to insert useful codes written in other files, in the flow of execution.
Include and require are identical, except upon failure:
So, if you want the execution to go on and show users the output, even if the include file is missing, use include. Otherwise, in case of FrameWork, CMS or a complex PHP application coding, always use require to include a key file to the flow of execution. This will help avoid compromising your application's security and integrity, just in-case one key file is accidentally missing.
Including files saves a lot of work. This means that you can create a standard header, footer, or menu file for all your web pages. Then, when the header needs to be updated, you can only update the header include file.
include 'filename.ext';
or
require 'filename';
You may like to go through the details of
Include, Require, Require_once & Include_once.
Enjoy!
Anand Chavan