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Alex Watts
8,396 PointsWhy use PHP include?
I am currently watching "Build a Basic PHP Website" by Alena Holligan. Is it good practise to use the PHP include within a project. This method is confusing and it looks messy. Is there a better way of doing the same process?
3 Answers
Richard Hall
9,139 PointsWhat is it that looks confusing? Are you asking why use PHP include vs PHP require? Or just generally asking why would it be useful?
If the latter, one common idea is to separate the header and footer from a page. DRY programming - that is, don't repeat yourself. Instead of re-typing a header and footer on every page, you could make a header.php and a footer.php and
<? include 'footer.php'; ?>
on each page and it will load it in place.
Szabolcs Szána
6,961 PointsHi, maybe require_once();
Kevin D
8,646 PointsPHP include, require and include_once, require_once functions help us with code reuse. Sometimes we don't want to duplicate code so we can use these functions to copy code into the file.
It'll definitely be useful when you get to grips with it!