PHP Basics

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PHP is a server side scripting language, which is run on the server before the page is served to the client. Essentially it dynamically creates pages on the fly. It can be written on it's own our within normal standard HTML etc. It must be stored on a running webserver and you can only access it via it's URL in a browser. The page the client will receive will have all of the server side elements replaced with the output of the code. If your viewed source you would only see standard HTML and text.

Creating a Hello World in PHP

1 echo "hello world";
2 //Output:
3 //hello world

echo is used to write text to the page, you could also echo html code or variables:

1 echo "<p>Hello World<br>Hola Mundo</p>";
2 //Output:
3 //Hello World
4 //Hola Mundo