PHP Tutorial: Using Variables to Store and Display Student Information

This article, contributed by a certified author of php中文网, introduces a PHP exercise that requires storing a student's name, birth date, subject and student number in variables and displaying them on a web page.

Requirement analysis: the birth date must follow the Gregorian format YYYY‑MM‑DD; the student number must start with 0 followed by a two‑digit year, two‑digit month, two‑digit day and a three‑digit sequence (e.g., 0120519001); a 4‑row × 2‑column HTML table should embed PHP code to output the four fields.

Design ideas: define four variables ($name, $birth, $subject, $snum); embed PHP in an HTML table; each table row corresponds to name, birth date, subject, and student number.

Knowledge base: a variable is a temporary container for values such as numbers or strings; PHP is weakly typed and creates a variable on first assignment without prior declaration; naming rules require a leading $, a letter or underscore as the first character, no leading digit, and only letters, digits, or underscores thereafter, while PHP permits some keywords as variable names; common naming conventions include snake_case, camelCase (recommended), and PascalCase.

Code example for simple variable assignment:

<?php
$a=1;
$b='你好';
?>

Main student‑information code:

<?php
// define variables to store student data
$name = '王六'; // student name
$birth = '2003-08-07'; // birth date
$subject = 'PHP'; // subject
$snum = '0150427001'; // student number
?>

HTML table with embedded PHP to display the data:

<table>
<tr><th colspan="3">展示学生资料</th></tr>
<tr><td>姓　　名：</td><td><?php echo $name; ?></td></tr>
<tr><td>出生日期：</td><td><?php echo $birth; ?></td></tr>
<tr><td>学　　科：</td><td><?php echo $subject; ?></td></tr>
<tr><td>学　　号：</td><td><?php echo $snum; ?></td></tr>
</table>

The resulting page renders a table showing the student's name, birth date, subject and student number.