Today we are going to learn all about include and require! Include and require are handy to use not only in your php applications, but in general website design for sidebar’s and what not! So.. yeah.. Moving on!

Include and Require include a file within another PHP script. There are four ways of doing this:


Now using them is seriously simple. Lets say you have sidebar.php with your links? All you have do is put the following in your sidebar of your website:


Then you can have sidebar.php which includes links
Example:

One thing to remember is how to control directories in PHP. For instance, if my file “sidebar.php” is in a folder called includes you put in:


Or to take another route of it, if my file “sidebar.php” is in the /includes directory and the file I want the sidebar to show on is in a folder of that: /data I would put in:


Now why are there four different ways to include them I hear you ask! Well they are pretty simple.

Include and Require are practically the same, apart from the way they give out errors. Include will continue parsing your script and just shove out an error. Require however will stop the whole script to give you an error. Really it’s all down to what you want.

Include_once and require_once you probably guess only allow you to include the file once. This is not only more secure but stops from silly errors where the file was just included and variables were overwritten halfway through the script. Again they give out the same errors as include and require.

Note: Include_once is meant to be significantly faster than require_once in larger projects.

So lets go over one of each!





We really are spoilt for choice aren’t we!