How to link a HMTL link with a PHP function?

Question

How to link a HTML link like this - <a href="#">Click here to log out</a>

to a PHP function like - logout()

What I need to do is, when people click a link, php will run the php function.

Please advice! :D

Answer 1

What I need to do is, when people click a link, php will run the php function.

You can not call a PHP (server-side language) function when clicking on a link. From your question, I suspect you want to provide a link for users to logout, below is how you should go about.

Your link should be like:

<a href="logout.php">Click here to log out</a>

And in logout.php you should put php code for logging the user out.

Code inside logout.php might look like this:

<?php
  session_start();
  unset($_SESSION['user']); // remove individual session var
  session_destroy();
  header('location: login.php'); // redirct to certain page now
?>

Answer 2

There are a number of ways; just to get this out of the way first. There is no way to invoke a PHP function from the client side (i.e, user interaction at the browser) without a page refresh unless you use AJAX. As one answer suggests, you can put the function in a PHP page, and link to it. Here's another way

<a href="index.php?action=logout">Logout</a>

And inside index.php

<?php
    switch $_GET['action']:
    {
         ....

         case 'logout': logout(); break;
         ...

    }
 ?>

There are other more sophisicated methods, such as determining which function to call from URI directly, which is used by frameworks like CodeIgniter and Kohana.