[ALUG] How to display result of remote PHP script within a HTML page

Tue Dec 4 11:12:44 GMT 2007

On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 10:25 +0000, sagr wrote:
> Hi folks.
> 
> A very dumb question from a HTML / PHP beginner...
> 
> I have written a simple hit counter prog which I can access by running:
> http://www.suffolk-ancestor-genealogy-research.co.uk/counters/counter.php?webpage=main
> 
> I now want to integrate this into a HTML website page, so that this remote
> script "counter.php" is run and the result displayed on the HTML webpage
> each time the page is viewed.
> 
> I have created a simple HTML page:
> http://www.suffolk-ancestor-genealogy-research.co.uk/counters/count_page.html
> 
> which just consists of:
> 
> <HTML>
> <BODY>
> <script
> src="http://www.suffolk-ancestor-genealogy-research.co.uk/counters/counter.php?webpage=main"></script>
> </BODY>
> </HTML>
> 
> When I go to this count_page.html webpage the hit counter is incremented but
> the result is not displayed on the webpage (even though it's output is
> visible when I run the script counter.php directly).
> 
> How do I get the result from the remote script counter.php to display on my
> count_page.html page?

Hi sagr,

Your problem here is that the counter page is not generating valid
ECMAscript (aka Javascript) to insert elements into the outer page.
There are a couple of solutions that spring to mind:

[1] Counter page generates valid ECMAscript, eg:
    document.write(counter);

[2] Counter page generates vallid HTML, which you include in an IFRAME:
    <html><body>$counter</body></html>
    main page contains: <iframe src="...counter.php?page=main"/>

[3] Since it's PHP, just include the counter page in all other pages?
    This does mean you cannot have static HTML pages, everything must be
    a PHP.

HTH,
Phil.