Inserting HTML Into A Page?

Hi all,

I have a problem, and I'm wondering if there's a practical solution to it...

I want to insert an HTML page into an existing HTML page. I want to insert a list of recent article links into every page of my website, without having to cut and paste the code directly onto every page, every single week.

Is there a way to tell my pages to insert a block of HTML code from an "article links" file?

The only idea I have is that I could code the HTML links code into a PHP file, and then get my pages to call run PHP file everytime a page is loaded. But I have no idea what function I would use.

Any suggestions?

If your server supports PHP, the easiest solution would be to create a separate file. Name the file something like 'links.htm' and paste in the HTML code you want on every page.

On the main page, use <?php include('links.htm'); ?> to include the external file. Make sure your main page is named .php so your server will run it through the PHP interpretor.

You might find PHP's documentation of include() helpful.

Are you saying my main page should then be index.php? If I want to insert this code on every page in my website, would that also mean that every page would have to be a .php?

If so, I'm not sure I can work with that. Is there any other way? Is there a way where I can keep the .html, but still use php within it to do what I want?

If you could create a .htaccess (no extension!) file, with this:
and put this in the root of your site, index.html will be parsed as php. Alternatively, you could remove 'index', so that all file ending in .html will be parsed. Don't do this unless you really want to parse them as php, it will make execution slower.

If used properly, there will be next to no code duplication with php.

Are there any other ways without using PHP?

Yes, Server Side Includes, but your server has to support them.

Thanks a million! So simple, and it works for me.

You're quite welcome!