As we all know this programming language is almost similar to C and C++. The only difference is C and C++ works on any platform and PHP is a server side scripting and works on only servers that can compile PHP on both windows and Linux base operating systems. A php compiler only can read a file with .php extension. So we need to save all the script files with .php extension. If we go through the below links we can understand the difference between a traditional high level language and php language.
On this article we will show a hello world program with basic structure of PHP scripting.
A php script starts with a special set of characters which is “<?php”. This set of characters means that the scripting start from here and the scripting ends with “?>” set of characters. The complier reads the scripts in between these two character set. It looks like below.
<?php
All the scripting should be in here.
?>
If we want to print hello world on our web browser then there are few pseudo codes we can use to show this.
- Echo
- Print_r
Echo usually just prints the character or characters in the double quotes. Also we can show the content of a variable using this pseudo code. We can write this like below.
$a=”Hello world”;
echo $a.
Or
echo “Hello world”;
If we need we can also use print. Print is same as echo. We just have to replace echo with print. It seems as below.
Print “Hellow world”;
Or print “$a”;
These are the simple way to print contents in PHP. There is also another pseudo code which works same.
Print_r();
Now the last one is a bit different than the previous two. The last one usually prints an array in a formatted manner.
Let’s see how the program seems as a whole.
<?php
$a=”Hello world”;
echo $a . “\n”;
echo “Hello world \n”;
print “Hello world\n”;
print “$a\n” ;
?>
Suppose we want to use print_r function then we have to declare an array, then we can print an array using this function.
$b=(“me”,”you”,”him”, “her”);
Print_r($b);
The output will be.
[0] => me
[1] => you
[2] => him
[3] => her
These are the simple output generating pseudo codes.
In php program we have to understand the architecture of the program and how it works only then we can make a simple and easier program using this language.
On my next article I will try to describe about the different loops in this language.
