Head First PHP & MySQL

Quite often I go to a website like Google or Kayak and find myself looking at a German version of the site. Okay, I do live in Germany, but why assume that everyone within Germany speaks German? What about visitors from other countries, or even people living here that would prefer to use another language?

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Dynamic Web sites, as opposed to the static ones on which the Web was first built, are easier to maintain, are more responsive to users, and can alter their content in response to differing situations. In this chapter, I’ll be covering a hodgepodge of ideas, all used to create dynamic Web applications. These include incorporating external files, handling forms and form data in new ways, writing and using your own functions, using PHP’s date function, and sending email.

What all of these concepts have in common is that more sophisticated Web applications almost always use them. But as you develop more complex Web sites, you’ll see that this methodology has many limitations. PHP can readily make use of external files, a capability that allows you to divide your scripts into their distinct parts.

PHP has four functions for using external files: Previous versions of PHP had a different distinction between when you’d use include and when you’d use require. Now the functions are exactly the same when working properly but behave differently when they fail. If an include function doesn’t work it cannot include the file for some reason , a warning will be printed to the Web browser Figure 3.