How to pass arguments to an included file?

You can't pass arguments to include, but it has access to all variables you've already set. From the include documentation:

When a file is included, the code it contains inherits the variable scope of the line on which the include occurs. Any variables available at that line in the calling file will be available within the called file, from that point forward.

Thus:

index.php

<?php
$header = 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa';
include("header.php");
?>

header.php

<title> <?php echo $header; ?> </title>

index.php:

<?php
$my_header = 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa';
include 'header.php';
?>

and header.php

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="Keywords" content=" <?php echo $my_header ?> " />
<meta name="Description" content=" <?php echo $my_header ?> " />
<title> <?php echo $my_header ?> </title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="reset.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
</head>

It's not an ideal solution, but I understand it's your first steps in php.

PS. Your Doctype doesn't match the code. I've adjusted your header html to be XHTML.


Include has the scope of the line it's called from.

If you don't want to create new global variables, you can wrap include() with a function:

function includeHeader($title) {
    include("inc/header.php");
}

$title will be defined in the included code whenever you call includeHeader with a value, for example includeHeader('My Fancy Title').

If you want to pass more than one variable you can always pass an array instead of a string.

Let's create a generic function:

function includeFile($file, $variables) {
    include($file);
}

Voila!

Using extract makes it even neater:

function includeFileWithVariables($fileName, $variables) {
   extract($variables);
   include($fileName);
}

Now you can do:

includeFileWithVariables("header.php", array(
    'keywords'=> "Potato, Tomato, Toothpaste",
    'title'=> "Hello World"
));

Knowing that it will cause variables $keywords and $title to be defined in the scope of the included code.

Tags:

Php

Include

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