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In PHP, the console is a command-line interface, which is also called interactive shell. We can access it by typing the following command in a terminal:
php -a
If we type any PHP code in the shell and hit enter, it is executed directly and displays the output or shows the error messages in case of any error. A sample run of a PHP code, that reads input from PHP console looks like this:
In this article, We will discuss two methods for reading console or user input in PHP:
Method
1: Using readline[] function is a built-in function in PHP. This function is used to read console input.
The following things can be achieved by readline[] function:
- Accept a single input by prompting the user:
PHP
Output:
Enter a string: GeeksforGeeks GeeksforGeeks
- By default, the data type of the variable accepted through readline[] function is string. So for any other data type, we have to typecast it explicitly as described below.
PHP
Output:
Enter an integer: 10 Enter a floating point number: 9.78 Entered integer is 10 and entered float is 9.78
- We can achieve the same things without prompting the user also:
$a = readline[];
- In this case, as soon as the user hits enter, the entered value is stored in the variable a.
- Accept multiple space separated inputs: For this, we use another function explode[] together with readline[]. The first argument of explode[] is the delimiter we want to use. In the below example, the delimiter is space. The second argument is the readline[] function. Here also the data type of $var1 and $var2 will be string. So we have to separately typecast them for other data types. In the above example, the typecasting is shown for integers.
PHP
Output:
The sum of 10 and 20 is 30
- We can also read an array through explode[]:
PHP
Output:
Array
[
[0] => 1
[1] => 2
[2] => 3
[3] => 4
[4] => 5
[5] => 6
]Method 2: Using fscanf[] function works same as the fscanf[] function in C. We can read 2 integers from Keyboard[STDIN] as below:
- This is different from the previous method
PHP
Output:
The sum of 1 and 5 is 6
Comparison between two methods:
- No need to use explicit typecasting for fscanf[] function, because it is done by the format specifiers , e.g. %d, %f, %c etc. You can read more about format specifiers.
- fscanf[] function is much faster than the readline[] function.
PHP is a server-side scripting language designed specifically for web development. You can learn PHP from the ground up by following this PHP Tutorial and PHP Examples.