Jed Verity wrote: >I can't find any information on passing JavaScript variables to PHP on the >same page (i.e. not through the POST information of a submitted form). Is >this because it's not possible? > Basically, this is not possible.
A common area of confusion to those new to Web programming is the distinction between client-side and server-side code. PHP is an example of a server-side scripting language, while JavaScript is client-side. To PHP, anything that is not PHP is simply output. It doesn't matter if the output is HTML, JavaScript, XML, an image, etc. - it's all "not PHP." When a user requests a PHP script, the PHP part of the script is executed prior to the output being sent to the client. Remember, the output may contain JavaScript. Once the output reaches the browser, the browser will attempt to render the HTML, execute the JavaScript, and whatever else is appropriate. So, to get back to your question, you are wanting to know how to have the browser (which is executing the JavaScript) be able to send a JavaScript variable to PHP (which could be thousands of miles away on whatever Web server the page was obtained from) "on the same page," which means you want to be able to do this without communicating back to the Web server. So, your question can be summarized into: "How can my browser send data back to the Web server without any further communication with the Web server?" Hopefully that explains how it is impossible. The terms server-side and client-side are ignored by most people, understandably, because this industry is littered with useless terms that do little to describe what is really happening (in the case of "Web services," the term is actually misleading in my opinion). However, these terms are very descriptive, and once you can begin to understand which code is executed on the server-side (by the Web server prior to sending the response to the Web client) and which code is executed on the client-side (by the Web client after receiving the response from the Web server), all of these types of questions will make more sense to you. Hope that gives a good description of the difference and can help you solve whatever problem you're currently working on. Chris -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
