php links and content - help please

[dubbed]

i am new to php and know some basics, so please excuse my ignorance. any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

this is the basic layout of a particular page:

articles.php

-----------------------------
header
-----------------------------
link to article1
link to article2
link to article3
link to article4
etc
-----------------------------
footer
-----------------------------

what i want to achieve is - all of the content for links 1-4 are within articles.php. when a link is clicked, the links would disappear and the article content displayed.

is this possible?

thank you in advance.

:)

[jatar_k]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld dubbed,

I think in this instance you could use a variable in the url to display the appropriate article once clicked.

your links could look something like this

<a href="articles.php?article=1">article1</a>

then do a test to see is the variable is set

if (!isset($_GET['article']) ¦¦ $_GET['article'] == "") {
// echo all links
} else {
// echo individual content
}

[dubbed]

thanks jatar.

once i have done the code for the echo, what is the code for the contect?

your help is very much appreciated.

[dubbed]

/content

[jatar_k]

it depends actually

is all the content smashed into the one file or is the actual content in seperate files?

If the content is stored in seperate files you could do

} else { 
 $articlepage = "article" . $_GET['article'] . ".html"; 
 include $articlepage; 
}

this would assume that the articles are located in the same directory and are named article1.html, article2.html etc.

or if all the content is smashed in there you could use a switch

} else { 
 switch ($_GET['article']) { 
 case 1: 
 // article1 content 
 break; 
 case 2: 
 // article2 content 
 break; 
 case 3: 
 // article3 content 
 break; 
 } 
}

one case for each article, though that may make that file fairly huge as time goes on

[dubbed]

i have saved the following as article.php to test

i'm getting a parse error on line 7:

<a href="articles.php?article=1">article1</a>
<a href="articles.php?article=2">article2</a>
<a href="articles.php?article=3">article3</a>

<?php

if (!isset($_GET['article']) ¦¦ $_GET['article'] == "") {
// echo all links
} else { switch ($_GET['article']) {
case 1:
article1 content
break;
case 2:
article2 content
break;
case 3:
article3 content
break; } }

?>

[dubbed]

jatar. you are a star! thank you for your help.

i have fixed the script, and yes it does work :)

now the task of entering 61 articles into this page. ugh.

[hakre]

hi dubbed,

checkout the nice include() [php.net] function. you can simply load in each article, so you can divide the one-big-file into manies.

--hakre

[dubbed]

thanks to you both! a credit to this community.