Countdown Timer on Page

[KodiTiger]

Newbie PHP user here, so go easy on me .

 

I've been trying to make a timer that starts on an arbitrary number of seconds, say 10 for example, then counts down to 0 (and refreshes itself every second for the user to see how much time is remaining), and then some more code is executed when 0 is reached.

 

I attempted to do something like:

 

<?php

 

$goal = time() + 10;

 

while($goal - time() >= 0) {

 

echo "$goal - time()";

sleep(1);

 

}

 

?>

 

This didn't seem to work as my page just took a while to load - I suspect it was going through the entire while loop before displaying anything rather than just dynamically updating the timer every second. Also when I chose 100 instead of 10, the webpage didn't seem to even finish loading. Also it displayed a lot of odd text - not a timer at all!

 

Help would be much appreciated !

[.josh]

php is a server-side language.  When the script is requested (like when you go to http://www.yoursite.com/yourscript.php) the server parses and executes all php and then outputs the results (if any) as the response (which the browser/client does whatever with it).  You can *technically achieve what you are doing using ob_flush but it is seriously not advisable. 

 

If you want to have a countdown timer like that, you should use javascript, which is a client-side language. Basically you would just use setTimeout() to countdown (lots of basic js tuts for timers, give it a go in google).

 

 

[KodiTiger]

Thanks very much , got a working timer now!