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10.

Using require to Include Functions

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Using require to Include Functions

I’ll show you a few more tricks with functions in a second. But right now, let’s improve our contact.php page we started earlier. First, I want to be able to have a header that reads “Helping you find your new best friend from over 500 pets.”:

<h1>
    Helping you find your new best friend from over 500 pets.
</h1>

Except, I want the number 500 to be dynamic, reflecting the true number of pets we have in our pets.json file. I’ll do this by calling our get_pets() function and passing it to PHP’s count function, which will tell us how many items are in that array:

<h1>
    Helping you find your new best friend from over <?php echo count(get_pets()); ?> pets.
</h1>

But when we try it, it blow up big time!

Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_pets() in /php1/contact.php on line 2

Hmm, the function works in index.php, but not in contact.php. Clearly, the difference is that get_pets() actually lives in index.php. And that’s totally correct. Even though it sits next to index.php, when PHP executes the contact page, it has no idea what functions or variables might live in the index file. These two files exist in perfect isolation.

So is there a way to load the functions in index.php from contact.php? Of course! The answer is with the require statement, which tells PHP to load & parse the contents of some other file. Require index.php at the top of the file:

<?php
// contact.php
require 'index.php';
?>

<h1>
    Helping you find your new best friend from over <?php echo count(get_pets()); ?> pets.
</h1>

When we try it, it works... sort of. At the bottom of the page, we see our sentence with the correct pets count. But above it is the entire index.php page, which we did not want. Adding require made using the get_pets() function possible, but it also brought in all the HTML from the index page as well. What can we do?

Let’s create a new file called functions.php, which I’ll put in a lib/ directory for organization since this PHP file isn’t meant to be a page that’s accessed directly like our index and contact files. Now, move the get_pets() function in here, being sure to remember your opening PHP tag:

<?php
// lib/functions.php

function get_pets()
{
    $petsJson = file_get_contents('data/pets.json');
    $pets = json_decode($petsJson, true);

    return $pets;
}

No Closing PHP Tag?

If you’re screaming that I forgot the closing PHP tag, you’re half-right. If the last thing you have in a file is PHP code, adding the closing PHP tag is optional, and it’s actually better if you leave it off. If that confuses you, go ahead and close your PHP tags for now.

Tip

Why is not closing your PHP tags better when you don’t have to? Great question - see http://bit.ly/IsCwPE.

Using functions.php

Now, simply require lib/functions.php from both the index and contact files:

<?php
// index.php
require 'lib/functions.php';
// ...
<?php
// contact.php
require 'lib/functions.php';
// ...

Both will now have access to the get_pets function, but without any extra HTML, since functions.php doesn’t have any. When we try them, they both work!

require, require_once, include, include_once

Actually, there are 4 statements that can be used to execute an external file:

  • require;
  • require_once;
  • include;
  • include_once.

The difference between require and require_once is simple: require will always load a file while require_once will make sure that it only loads the file one time no matter how many times you call it. So if functions.php were doing some initialization and it was really important to only include this file once, we might use require_once just to be safe. This becomes more important later when you work with classes.

The other two statements are include and include_once. These are exactly the same as require and require_once, except that if the file doesn’t exist, include let’s the script keep running. On the other hand, if a file imported with require is missing, a fatal error will occur and your page will be killed immediately. In practice, I almost never use include, because I have a hard time imagining a scenario where my app is including another PHP file that only might exist. Does it take a break every 15 minutes and leave my server?

To keep things simple, use require or require_once, if you need to. But realize two things. First, all 4 of these do the same thing. And second, if you stick with us, you’ll be programming sites that are so well-built that you will practically stop using any of these. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.