How to call a PHP file from HTML or Javascript

Question

I ve looked around for a long while now and I can t find anywhere that answers this seemingly basic question  I don t care if the page reloads or displays the results immediately  I just want to have a button on my website make a PHP file run  That s it  And I ve found that all websites either tell you how to run the PHP code in your HTML directly or tell you to use ajax  I ll use ajax if it turns out to be necessary  but there was a time before ajax existed that PHP was used  so I think there s a simpler way  If I can write the code inside HTML just fine  why can t I just reference the file for it in there or make a simple call for it in Javascript   If it does turn out that ajax is the only way forward  what do I need to know about it to call a PHP file that will create a text file on a button press  I m making a simple blog site for myself and I ve got the code for the site and the javascript that can take the post I write in a textarea and display it immediately  I just want to link it to a PHP file that will create the permanent blog post on the server so that when I reload the page  the post is still there    Thanks for taking the time to read and answer

User · Answer

As you have already stated in your question you have more than one option. A very basic approach would be using the tag referencing your PHP file in the method attribute. However as esoteric as it may sound AJAX is a more complete approach. Considering that an AJAX call (in combination with jQuery) can be as simple as:

$.post("yourfile.php", {data : "This can be as long as you want"});

And you get a more flexible solution, for example triggering a function after the server request is completed. Hope this helps.

User · Answer

How to make a button call PHP      I don t care if the page reloads or displays the results immediately    Good   Note  If you don t want to refresh the page see  Ok    but how do I Use Ajax anyway   below      I just want to have a button on my website make a PHP file run    That can be done with a form with a single button    lt form action    gt     lt input type  submit  value  my button   gt   lt  form gt       That s it    Pretty much  Also note that there are cases where ajax is really the way to go   That depends on what you want  In general terms you only need ajax when you want to avoid realoading the page  Still you have said that you don t care about that     Why I cannot call PHP directly from JavaScript      If I can write the code inside HTML just fine  why can t I just reference the file for it in there or make a simple call for it in Javascript    Because the PHP code is not in the HTML just fine  That s an illusion created by the way most server side scripting languages works  including PHP  JSP  and ASP   That code only exists on the server  and it is no reachable form the client  the browser  without a remote call of some sort   You can see evidence of this if you ask your browser to show the source code of the page  There you will not see the PHP code  that is because the PHP code is not send to the client  therefore it cannot be executed from the client  That s why you need to do a remote call to be able to have the client trigger the execution of PHP code   If you don t use a form  as shown above  you can do that remote call from JavaScript with a little thing called Ajax  You may also want to consider if what you want to do in PHP can be done directly in JavaScript     How to call another PHP file   Use a form to do the call  You can have it to direct the user to a particlar file    lt form action  myphpfile php  gt     lt input type  submit  value  click on me   gt   lt  form gt    The user will end up in the page myphpfile php  To make it work for the current page  set action to an empty string  which is what I did in the example I gave you early       I just want to link it to a PHP file that will create the permanent blog post on the server so that when I reload the page  the post is still there    You want to make an operation on the server  you should make your form have the fields you need  even if type  hidden  and use POST     lt form action    method  POST  gt     lt input type  text  value  default value  you can edit it  name  myfield  gt     lt input type  submit  value    post  gt   lt  form gt         What do I need to know about it to call a PHP file that will create a text file on a button press    see  How to write into a file in PHP     How do you recieve the data from the POST in the server   I m glad you ask    Since you are a newb begginer  I ll give you a little template you can follow    lt  php     if    SERVER  REQUEST METHOD        POST                   Ok we got a POST  probably from a FORM  read from   POST          var dump   PSOT     Use this to see what info we got            else                You could assume you got a GET        var dump   GET     Use this to see what info we got           gt    lt  DOCTYPE html gt    lt html lang  en  gt      lt head gt        lt meta char-set  utf-8  gt        lt title gt Page title lt  title gt      lt  head gt      lt body gt        lt form action    method  POST  gt          lt input type  text  value  default value  you can edit it  name  myfield  gt          lt input type  submit  value    post  gt        lt  form gt      lt  body gt    lt  html gt    Note  you can remove var dump  it is just for debugging purposes     How do I     I know the next stage  you will be asking how to    how to pass variables form a PHP file to another  how to remember the user   make a login  how to avoid that anoying message the appears when you reload the page    There is a single answer for that  Sessions   I ll give a more extensive template for Post-Redirect-Get   lt  php     if    SERVER  REQUEST METHOD        POST                 var dump   PSOT             Do stuff              Write results to session         session start              SESSION  stuff      something            You can store stuff such as the user ID  so you can remeember him            redirect          header  Location     true  303             The redirection will cause the browser to request with GET           The results of the operation are in the session variable           It has empty location because we are redirecting to the same page           Otherwise use  header  Location  anotherpage php   true  303            exit              else                 You could assume you got a GET         var dump   GET     Use this to see what info we got            Get stuff from session         session start            if  array key exists  stuff     SESSION                         something     SESSION  stuff                 we got stuff              later use present the results of the operation to the user                      clear stuff from session          unset   SESSION  stuff               set headers         header  Content-Type  text html  charset utf-8              This header is telling the browser what are we sending            And it says we are sending HTML in UTF-8 encoding          gt   lt  DOCTYPE html gt   lt html lang  en  gt     lt head gt       lt meta char-set  utf-8  gt       lt title gt Page title lt  title gt     lt  head gt     lt body gt       lt  php if  isset  something    echo   lt span gt    something   lt  span gt     gt        lt form action    method  POST  gt         lt input type  text  value  default value  you can edit it  name  myfield  gt         lt input type  submit  value    post  gt       lt  form gt     lt  body gt   lt  html gt    Please look at php net for any function call you don t recognize  Also - if you don t have already - get a good tutorial on HTML5   Also  use UTF-8 because UTF-8     Notes      I m making a simple blog site for myself and I ve got the code for the site and the javascript that can take the post I write in a textarea and display it immediately    If are you using a CMS  Codepress  Joomla  Drupal    etc   That make put some contraints on how you got to do things   Also  if you are using a framework  you should look at their documentation or ask at their forum mailing list discussion page contact or try to ask the authors     Ok    but how do I Use Ajax anyway   Well    Ajax is made easy by some JavaScript libraries  Since you are a begginer  I ll recomend jQuery   So  let s send something to the server via Ajax with jQuery  I ll use   post instead of   ajax for this example    lt  php     if    SERVER  REQUEST METHOD        POST                 var dump   PSOT           header  Location     true  303           exit              else               var dump   GET           header  Content-Type  text html  charset utf-8             gt   lt  DOCTYPE html gt   lt html lang  en  gt     lt head gt       lt meta char-set  utf-8  gt       lt title gt Page title lt  title gt       lt script gt          function ajaxmagic                           post                                call the server                  test php                         At this url                                       field   value                       name   John                                                    And send this data to it               done                                And when it s done                 function data                                            fromAjax   html data      Update here with the response                                                 lt  script gt     lt  head gt     lt body gt       lt input type  button  value    use ajax   onclick  ajaxmagic    gt       lt span id  fromAjax  gt  lt  span gt     lt  body gt   lt  html gt    The above code will send a POST request to the page test php   Note  You can mix sessions with ajax and stuff if you want     How do I      How do I connect to the database  How do I prevent SQL injection  Why shouldn t I use Mysql   functions        for these or any other  please make another questions  That s too much for this one

User · Answer

I just want to have a button on my website make a PHP file run    lt form action  my php  method  post  gt       lt input type  submit  gt   lt  form gt    Generally speaking  however  unless you are sending new data to the server to be stored  you would just use a link    lt a href  my php  gt run php lt  a gt     Although you should use link text that describes what happens from the user s point of view  not the servers        I m making a simple blog site for myself and I ve got the code for the site and the javascript that can take the post I write in a textarea and display it immediately  I just want to link it to a PHP file that will create the permanent blog post on the server so that when I reload the page  the post is still there    This is tricker    First  you do need to use a form and POST  since you are sending data to be stored    Then you need to store the data somewhere  This is normally done using a database  Read up on the PDO library for PHP  It is the standard way to interact with databases   Then you need to pull the data back out again  The simplest approach here is to use the query string to pass the primary key for the database row with the entry you wish to display    lt a href  showBlogEntry php entry id 123  gt     lt  a gt    Make sure you also read up on SQL injection and XSS

User · Answer

You just need to post the form data to the insert php file function  see below     class DbConnect      Database login vars private  dbHostname       private  dbDatabase       private  dbUsername       private  dbPassword       public  db   null   public function connect          try                this- gt db   new PDO  mysql host    this- gt dbHostname   dbname    this- gt dbDatabase   this- gt dbUsername   this- gt dbPassword            this- gt db- gt setAttribute PDO  ATTR ERRMODE  PDO  ERRMODE EXCEPTION             catch PDOException  e                echo  It seems there was an error   Please refresh your browser and try again     e- gt getMessage             public function store  email         stm    this- gt db- gt prepare  INSERT INTO subscribers  email  VALUES           stm- gt bindValue 1   email        return  stm- gt execute

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