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Query and display results from database on html page?
Hello,
I'm working on a personal webpage with very limited knowledge of html so I apologize for the simplicity of the question.
I would like to search and display results from a database on my html page.
The database will only have 3 columns; column 1 will have search terms, and column 2&3 will hold the data to be displayed on the webpage when the respective search term from column 1 is searched.
Ex) 1: Product name 2: Price 3: Quantity available
I am in no way familiar with using databases like SQL, so based on my research, I'm thinking excel or SQLite will be the easiest for me to learn and implement.
I can't seem to find information or tutorials on the web regarding using SQLite the way I want to. Is my understanding of SQLite incorrect?
What method might be the easiest for me to implement my search function? Ideally, I would like my database to be scaleable as well.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance.
1 Answer
- ChrisLv 74 years agoFavorite Answer
You are missing a key component: server-side scripting. A typical language you can use for that is PHP.
The problem is that despite many people believing otherwise, HTML is not a programming language. It cannot query a database. HTML is basically just a way to format text nicely, if you will. You can use it to make parts of your text clickable, or to arrange it into a submittable form. But HTML cannot actually *do* anything.
To implement a database in your website, whether SQL, SQLite or some other one, you need a webserver that can do more than just send back HTML documents; you need one that can actually run scripts.
The idea is that upon a request by the user (i.e. clicking a link or sending a form), instead of simply sending back a static HTML file, the server will run a script. The script does stuff on the server (like for instance read from a database), then composes HTML code on the fly. This HTML is sent back to the browser.
PHP is made for beginners, and using it is pretty basic:
<p>This is HTML.</p>
<p><?php
// in here is php code, a script that is being processed on the server
echo 3 * 5;
?></p>
If you save the above as index.php in a php server's document root and visit the server in a browser, the script will run and cause the following HTML to be transmitted:
<p>This is HTML.</p>
<p>15</p>
The php server transmits everything outside php tags as-is, but runs the code inside them. I'm using the echo command to print the result of a simply calculation, which ends up in between the static HTML.
To develop the website on your own computer you need to set up a local webserver and database server. Here's a free all-in-one package: https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html
