Specifications

Different tag styles are available. This is the short style. If you have some problems running

this script, it might be because short tags are not enabled in your PHP installation. Let’s look at

this in more detail.

PHP Tag Styles

There are actually four different styles of PHP tags we can use. Each of the following frag-

ments of code is equivalent.

• Short style

<? echo “<p>Order processed.”; ?>

This is the tag style that will be used in this book. It is the default tag that PHP develop-

ers use to code PHP.

This style of tag is the simplest and follows the style of an SGML (Standard Generalized

Markup Language) processing instruction. To use this type of tag—which is the shortest

to type—you either need to enable short tags in your config file, or compile PHP with

short tags enabled. You can find more information on how to do this in Appendix A.

• XML style

<?php echo “<p>Order processed.”; ?>

This style of tag can be used with XML (Extensible Markup Language) documents. If

you plan to serve XML on your site, you should use this style of tag.

• SCRIPT style

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=’php’> echo “<p>Order processed.”; </SCRIPT>

This style of tag is the longest and will be familiar if you’ve used JavaScript or

VBScript. It can be used if you are using an HTML editor that gives you problems with

the other tag styles.

• ASP style

<% echo “<p>Order processed.”; %>

This style of tag is the same as used in Active Server Pages (ASP). It can be used if you

have enabled the asp_tags configuration setting. You might want to use this style of tag if

you are using an editor that is geared towards ASP or if you already program in ASP.

PHP Statements

We tell the PHP interpreter what to do by having PHP statements between our opening and

closing tags. In this example, we used only one type of statement:

echo “<p>Order processed.”;

PHP Crash Course

HAPTER 1

PHP CRASH

COURSE

03 7842 CH01 3/6/01 3:39 PM Page 15