What is wrong with my link generated from PHP?

Question

In my code I am just hyperlinking to an anchor tag for a PHP function when I click

My code is below, another.php is called by AJAX, index.php from JQuery.

another.php

 <?php

   echo " <a href='my.php?action=show&amp;id=".$fid."'
     onclick=\"return  display('".$fid."');\"> ";  
  echo "" .$fname."</a> ";
 ?>

The hyperlink does not work when I click it.
Am I having a problem with leading spaces?
Do I need to change my code?

Answer 1

Why is your second echo "" .$fname."</a> "; ??? The first "" doesn't have to be there at all

Moreover it appears that the space shouldn't be in front of dot - .

Answer 2

If the "display" function is returning false, your onclick handler is short circuiting the default hyperlink functionality. Instead of onclick being set to "return display($fid)", just set onclick="display($fid)" and the hyperlink will always work.

Without seeing the rest of your code or a more detailed description, I can't really tell what else might be the problem. But this is the first thing that jumps out at me. If an element's event handler returns false, the regular functionality never occurs.

Answer 3

<?php
   echo '<a href="my.php?action=show&id='.$fid.'"
     onclick="return  display(\''.$fid.'\');">'.$fname.'</a>';
 ?>

That should work I always use ' for php strings and " in the HTML part makes it a lot easier to read :)

Also the bigger error was that your link looked like this: Bla because you made the a self closing it probably was showing a link with no value

Answer 4

I can't quite figure out what do you want to achieve with all that stuff inside one anchor tag... react to an onclick event and redirect the browser to another location? I have learned that the easy way of tweaking an <a> tag's functionality is:

<a href="javascript:doStuffHere()" id="...">...</a>

So you don't mix onclick with the mandatory href. Try rebuilding your link to be something like this.

As to your PHP style, when you're using double quotes for delimiting Strings, you don't have to break out of the quotes to insert variable contents. You could wirte:

<?php

$fid = 'myId';
$fname = 'my link name';

echo "<a id=\"$fid\" href=\"javascript:doStuff()\">$fname</a>";

?>

Answer 5

Like the others have mentioned it is probably something with the JavaScript return. As I can't really say anything wrong with the PHP code its self that would cause the problem.

However, I do have some tips to make your code a little more easy on the eyes.

My first suggestion with dealing with strings is to never force yourself to escape ' or ". By switching your quote style, you can make it drastically easier to read your code and find issues caused by quotes much easier.

echo " <a href='my.php?action=show&amp;id=".$fid."' onclick=\"return display('".$fid."');\"/> ";

This would become:

echo ' <a href="my.php?action=show&amp;id='.$fid.'" onclick="return display("'.$fid.'");"> '.$link_title.'</a>;

Actually, while typing this out, I noticed you aren't getting a hyperlink because you aren't completing the anchor tag. More specifically, you are terminating it early with the / In the above example, I have added:

.$link_title.'</a> This should fix the problem.

Second suggestion:

echo "" .$fname."</a> "; Can just as easily be typed out as:

echo $fname.'</a> ';

Using ' instead of " for strings that don't require extra work by the server is recommended, and the leading "" is not required.

EDIT:

echo ' <a href="my.php?action=show&amp;id='.$fid.'" onclick="return display("'.$fid.'");"> '.$fname.'</a>;

Does this work? Does it display the link?