Question

I have the following jquery code:

  while (count < 31) {
  window['cday_' + count] = <?php echo $day_1 ?>; 
  window['tday_' + count] = (window['cday_' + count] * formfig) / formfig2; 
  count++;
  }

But I need $day_1 in the php echo statement to reflect the variable “count”, so in theory it should be something like “echo $day_count”. Is it possible to pass the var to php?

---

php & jquery coding:

$i=0;
while ($i < $num) {
${"day_$i"}=mysql_result($result,$i,"datavalue");
$i++;
}

?>

<script type="text/javascript">
var chart1; 
var count=1;
var formfig=17;
var formfig2=2;

function chartdraw(){

      while (count < 31) {
      window['cday_' + count] = <?php echo $day_1 ?>; 
      window['tday_' + count] = (window['cday_' + count] * formfig) / formfig2; 
      count++;
      }

Answer 1

The short answer here is no.

To understand what’s possible, you need a deep understanding of what’s going on. Your PHP code is building an HTML document (with embedded JavaScript) and sending it on to the web browser. Once the web browser (which is, of course, running on the user’s machine, not your server) renders that page, it will execute the javascript. This is when the javascript variables begin to actually mean something. Until then, they are just text getting sent across the network. This point is long after the PHP code has finished running. Your server has already closed down that php instance as it sent the code to the user.

Keeping that in mind, you can send the value of a javascript variable (or any number of other things) back to your server with something called an ajax request. Essentially, this will send some information (the variable’s value, and the name of the page you want) back to your server, which will in turn cause your server to build a new web page, which can have PHP code in it. That web page’s content will get returned to another bit of javascript you can provide — called a ‘callback’ — which can take the page created by the second php script and make use of it. This is, of course, fairly resource intensive.

Unless you plan to do something that ONLY PHP can do, I would recommend finding a way to do as much of your logic as possible in javascript. This alleviates all these complex problems and keeps all the hard work on the user’s machine.

If you can structure your code so your php code provides all the data the javascript code needs before the php finishes running, you can get away without doing anything fancy with ajax. Here’s an example:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var days = {};
  <? for($day = 0; $day < 30; $day++) { ?>
    days.<? echo $day ?> = "<? echo get_day_info($day) ?>";
  <? } ?>
</script>

What this will do is create a javascript object called days. Then it will fill in days.i for i from 0 to 30. It assumes you have a function called get_day_info($day) which takes a day and returns the info for that day. I’m assuming here that you’re dealing with strings — if not, you will need to remove the quotes, and possibly do other things to wrap the data depending on what format it takes.