Function declaration and calling in PHP - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Function declaration and calling

📖 Scenario: You are creating a simple PHP program to greet users by their name. This is like writing a small helper that says hello whenever you ask it.

🎯 Goal: Build a PHP program that declares a function called greet which takes a name and returns a greeting message. Then call this function with a specific name and print the greeting.

📋 What You'll Learn

Declare a function named greet that accepts one parameter called name.

The function should return a string greeting in the format: "Hello, {name}!".

Call the greet function with the argument "Alice".

Print the result of the function call.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Functions help organize code into reusable blocks, like helpers that do one job well. This is common in all programming tasks.

💼 Career

Knowing how to declare and call functions is essential for any PHP developer to write clean, maintainable code.

1

Declare the greet function

Write a PHP function declaration named greet that takes one parameter called name. Inside the function, return the string "Hello, " concatenated with the name parameter and an exclamation mark "!".

PHP

<?php

// Declare the function greet with parameter name
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the function keyword, then the function name greet, and parentheses with $name inside. Use return to send back the greeting string.

2

Call the greet function with "Alice"

Create a variable called message and set it to the result of calling the greet function with the argument "Alice".

PHP

<?php

function greet($name) {
    return "Hello, " . $name . "!";
}

// Call greet with "Alice" and store in message
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the result of greet("Alice") to the variable $message.

3

Print the greeting message

Use echo to print the variable message.

PHP

<?php

function greet($name) {
    return "Hello, " . $name . "!";
}

$message = greet("Alice");

// Print the message
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo $message; to display the greeting on the screen.

4

Run the program and see the output

Run the PHP script and observe the output. It should print Hello, Alice! exactly.

PHP

<?php

function greet($name) {
    return "Hello, " . $name . "!";
}

$message = greet("Alice");
echo $message;

// Run the script to see output
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Make sure you run the PHP file in a server or command line to see the output.