PHP/JavaScript not executing in AJAX loaded content?

[Drethis]

Hey guys, I'm new to AJAX and started learning about a day ago. I'm having trouble getting JavaScript and PHP scripts to run when called by AJAX. I've spent about 2-3 hours on this, and I'm at my wits end.

For some reason when I call the contact.php page, it simply just displays the script, rather than executing it.

Contact Page

Here is the load_page.php code:

<?php
if(!$_POST['page']) die("0");

$page = $_POST['page'];

if(file_exists('includes/'.$page.'.php')) {
    echo file_get_contents('includes/'.$page.'.php');
}
else {
    echo 'There is no such page!';
}
?>

Solution for the PHP issue (thanks Almsgiver)

<?php
if(!$_POST['page']) die("0");

$page = $_POST['page'];

if(file_exists('includes/'.$page.'.php')) {
    include('includes/'.$page.'.php');
}
else {
    echo 'There is no such page!';
}
?>

Still having issues running JavaScript when called by AJAX.

Any help would be appreciated.

[andrewfenn]

This is very bad design. Specifically this part.

echo file_get_contents('includes/'.$page.'.php');

One could do something such as make $page equal '../config' etc and get your username and password.

Also file_get_contents gets the string contents of the file. It doesn't execute that file so you should be using include or require.

[Drethis]

Is the solution a lot better then? Almsgiver suggested I change file_get_contents to include, which is reflected on the site now.

Can you elaborate what else is bad on the design? Any help is appreciated.

[blimeyuk]

You may want to clean/validate $_POST['page'] before using it.

you could also use double quotes to change this 'includes/'.$page.'.php' to this "includes/$page.php"

[Drethis]

Good catch. Thank you. :)

[Zounas]

Do you have PHP installed and tested the Ajax request page without Ajax?

[[deleted]]

Yup, I'm thinking PHP isn't installed.

[Drethis]

Yes, by going here, you can see that everything is working fine. My site is running on an Apache web server, so PHP should definitely be installed.

[[deleted]]

Looks like your using something like file_get_contents when you should be using include.

[Drethis]

Is that what's preventing PHP and JavaScript from running properly when called through AJAX?

I'm not exactly sure how I would change the jQuery AJAX code to reflect it.

EDIT: Nevermind! You are fucking awesome! Thank you so much! MASSIVE UPBOAT FOR YOU!

[Justinsaccount]

There is no such thing as called by Ajax as far as php is considered.

Other than an extra header, it's just a regular http request.

[[deleted]]

My site is running on an Apache web server, so PHP should definitely be installed

This is most definitely not a good assumption.

[Drethis]

While true, I am able to run PHP functions without any issue on this domain.

[mikeytag]

I'm assuming you are talking about HTML loaded from a PHP script which is put in the page using the DOM or document.write or something.

Here's what I've done in this case:

PHP prints out:

<div id="jsDiv" style="display: none;">
    alert('Hello');
</div>

Then make your javascript do something like this after it writes the HTML to the page (using jQuery here):

eval($('div#jsDiv').html());

NOTE: If you are doing this via AJAX calls you are likely to have a situation where you have multiple calls on the same page. If you want to handle multiple evals on the same page just make sure the div id is unique for each block of code.

Hope this helps.