Question

What im trying to do, is use php include within a jquery append attribute. something like this:

$('a.popup[href^=#]').click(function() {
$('body').append('<div id="content" class="popup_block"><?php include( SITE_URL . 'activity/popup.php' ) ?></div>');

My script is in a php file, server side, so that i could accomplish this, but im not sure how to go about it. When it comes to html, css etc. I can combine it and php within the php file, but when it comes to javascript, its the quotes that confuses me, and when and how to use the brackets. This might sound confusing lol. Anyways, does CDATA have anything to do with it? I’ve never used it before, but I should atleast learn it’s use.

Answer 1

The PHP interpreter will only look for <?php and ?> tags and try to evaluate anything in between. It doesn’t care about surrounding quotes. You need to make sure though that the result of whatever PHP does is valid Javascript.

var foo = '<?php include 'foo.php'; ?>';

becomes

var foo = 'This is the content of foo.php.';

after PHP is done with it.

If there are any quotes in foo.php, it may become this:

var foo = 'This is the 'content' of foo.php.';

which is invalid Javascript syntax. You’ll need to escape any character of foo.php that may cause such invalid syntax, for example with addslashes. This can be quite cumbersome though, so I’d advise to look for an alternative this to begin with.

You can encode the value using JSON, which is definitely syntax safe:

var foo = <?php echo json_encode("Some string with 'quotes'."); ?>;

Generating code in code is always tricky, try to not do it and stick to language neutral data interchange formats like JSON or XML.