Introduction to PHP

Chapter 5
Topics Covered
⚫ PHP - what is it?
⚫ What does it do?
⚫ PHP Language basics
⚫ Syntax and structure
⚫ Variables and operators
⚫ Data types and conversions

2
Introduction
⚫ PHP is a general-purpose scripting
language geared towards web development.
⚫ It was originally created by Danish-
Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in
1993 and released in 1995
⚫ PHP was originally an abbreviation
of Personal Home Page, but it now stands
for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

3
PHP
⚫ > PHP is a server-side scripting language
(PHP scripts are executed on the server)
⚫ > PHP supports many databases (MySQL,
Oracle, Sybase, PostgreSQL etc.)
⚫ > PHP is open source software (PHP is free to
download and use)

4
 Science Calculations

System

System

C uses curly
braces { } for
code blocks.
Scripting/
Interpreted

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages

5
About the PHP Language
• Syntax inspired by C
- Curly braces, semicolons …
• Syntax inspired by perl
- Dollar signs to start variable names …
• Extends HTML to add segments of PHP
within an HTML file

6
 Version Release date Supported until
Release 1 8-Jun-95
2 1-Nov-97
History 3 6-Jun-98 20 October 2000
4 22 May 2000 23 June 2001
4.1 10 December 2001 12 March 2002
4.2 22 April 2002 6 September 2002
4.3 27 December 2002 31 March 2005
4.4 11 July 2005 7 August 2008
5 13 July 2004 5 September 2005
5.1 24 November 2005 24 August 2006
5.2 2 November 2006 6 January 2011
5.3 30 June 2009 14 August 2014
5.4 1 March 2012 3 September 2015
5.5 20 June 2013 10 July 2016
5.6 28 August 2014 31 December 2018
6.x Not released —
7 3 December 2015 10 January 2019
7.1 1-Dec-16 1 December 2019
7.2 30-Nov-17 30 November 2020
7.3 6 December 2018 6-Dec-21
7.4 28 November 2019 28-Nov-22
8 26 November 2020 26-Nov-23
8.1 25 November 2021 25-Nov-24
8.2 8 December 2022 8-Dec-25 7
8.3 23 November 2023 23-Nov-26
Over 77% of all active and live
websites in the world use PHP

8
PHP Demographics Statistics

9
Usage Statistics
⚫ These are the specific number of PHP-powered
websites in each territory:
✓ United States – 1,793,563
✓ Germany – 1,731,749
✓ Russia – 1,389,697
✓ United Kingdom – 1,017,478

10
PHP Trends Statistics
• PHP – 77.5%
• ASP.NET – 7.5%
• Ruby – 5.6%
• Java – 4.5%
• Scala – 2.7%
• JavaScript – 2.2%
• Python – 1.4%
• ColdFusion – 0.3%
• Perl – 0.1%
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Popular Sites Using PHP
o Microsoft.com
o Facebook.com
o Wikipedia.org
o Wordpress.org
o Zoom.com
o Vimeo.com

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Popularity
⚫ PHP is used for Web content management
systems including:
o MediaWiki,
o WordPress,
o Joomla,
o Moodle,
o eZ Publish,
o eZ Platform,
o etc... 13
PHP Frameworks
⚫ PHP has also attracted the development of
many software frameworks that provide
building blocks and a design structure to
promote rapid application development (RAD).
⚫ Some of these include
⚫ PRADO, CakePHP, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Laravel,
Yii Framework, Phalcon and Laminas.

14
PHP Deploying
⚫ There are many packages become
popular in the web industry as a way of
deploying PHP web applications such as:
⚫ LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP
(P may also refer to Python, Perl)
⚫ WAMP – Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP
⚫ MAMP – Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP
⚫ XAMPP – Cross-platform (X), Apache, MariaDB,
PHP, Perl
15
XAMPP

16
PHP Language Basics
⚫ Look at the building blocks of the PHP
language
⚫ Syntax and structure
⚫ Variables and operators
⚫ Data types and conversions

17
PHP - Syntax and Structure
⚫ PHP is similar to C
⚫ All scripts start with <?php and end with ?>
⚫ Line separator: ; (semi-colon)
⚫ Code block: { //code here }
⚫ Comments are created using:
⚫ // single line quote
⚫ /* Multiple line
block quote */

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PHP - Variables
⚫ Prefixed with a $
⚫ Assign values with = operator
⚫ Example: $author = “Trevor Adams”;
⚫ No need to define type
⚫ Variable names are case sensitive
⚫ $author and $Author are different

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PHP - Example Script
<?php
$author = “Trevor Adams”;
echo $author;
$msg = “Hello world!”;
Echo $msg;
?>

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PHP - Operators
⚫ Standard mathematical operators
⚫ +, -, *, / and % (modulus)
⚫ String concatenation with a period (.)
⚫ $car = “SEAT” . “ Altea”;
⚫ echo $car;
⚫ Would output “SEAT Altea”

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String concatenation Example
<?php
$author = “Trevor Adams”;
$msg = “Hello world!”;
echo $author . “ says ” . $msg;
?>

22
PHP – Operators (cont.)
⚫ Basic Boolean comparison with “==”
⚫ Using only = will overwrite a variable value
⚫ Less than < and greater than >
⚫ <= and >= as above but include equality

23
PHP - Data Types
⚫ PHP is loosely typed language.

⚫ A data type is either text or numeric

⚫ PHP decides what type a variable is
⚫ PHP can use variables in an appropriate way automatically

⚫ E.g.
⚫ $vat_rate = 0.175; // vat rate is numeric
⚫ echo $vat_rate * 100 . “%”;
⚫ //outputs “17.5%”

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PHP Data Types (cont.)

25
PHP Data Types (cont.)
⚫ We have to be careful and to test types during
execution
⚫ gettype() function returns a string representation of
variable’s type
$x = 5; echo gettype($x); // integer
$x = $x + 1.5; echo gettype($x) ; // float
$x = $x . “ dollars”; echo gettype($x); // string

⚫ is_<type>() function returns a boolean to test for a given

<type>
$x = 5; $check = is_int($x); // true
$check = is_float($x); // false
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Conversion / Casting

▪ As PHP evaluates expressions, sometimes

values in the expression need to be
converted from one type to another as the
computations are done.
• PHP does aggressive implicit type conversion
(casting).

• You can also make type conversion (casting) explicit

with casting operators.
27
Conversion / Casting (cont.)
⚫ A special feature of PHP is that it attempts to
temporarily convert a variable to the
appropriate type for an operation.
⚫ By contrast, most compiled languages
usually allow operations to be performed only
on variables of the same type.
⚫ Consider the following PHP code:
⚫ $amount = 10;
⚫ $items = "5";
⚫ $total = $amount * $items;
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Conversion / Casting (cont.)

⚫ Even though the code is multiplying an integer with a

string, the correct value of 50 is contained in $total.
⚫ Since the mathematical operators expect numbers as
operands, PHP tries to automatically convert the string to
a number before performing the multiplication.
⚫ If the string can’t be converted to a number, zero is used.
⚫ In the previse example, PHP converts $items to 5 and
performs the multiplication.

29
Casting In PHP, division forces
operands to be floating
point.
$a = 56; $b = 12;
$c = $a / $b;
echo "C: $c\n"; C: 4.66666666667
$d = "100" + 36.25 + TRUE; D: 137.25
echo "D: ". $d . "\n"; E: 8
$e = (int) 9.9 - 1; F: 25
echo "E: $e\n"; G: sam25
$f = "sam" + 25;
echo "F: $f\n";
$g = "sam" . 25;
echo "G: $g\n";

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Q&A

31