How can a PHP beginner effectively search for and output a specific user's information from a webpage?

To search for and output a specific user's information from a webpage in PHP, you can use a combination of HTML forms and PHP scripts. First, create a form where users can input the specific user's information (such as username or ID). Then, use PHP to process the form data, query the database for the user's information, and display it on the webpage. 

<?php
// Check if form is submitted
if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") {
    // Get the user input from the form
    $search_query = $_POST["search_query"];
    
    // Connect to the database
    $conn = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");
    
    // Query the database for the specific user's information
    $sql = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '$search_query'";
    $result = $conn->query($sql);
    
    // Display the user's information
    if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
        while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
            echo "Username: " . $row["username"] . "<br>";
            echo "Email: " . $row["email"] . "<br>";
            // Add more fields as needed
        }
    } else {
        echo "User not found.";
    }
    
    // Close the database connection
    $conn->close();
}
?>

<form method="post" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>">
    <label for="search_query">Enter username:</label>
    <input type="text" name="search_query">
    <input type="submit" value="Search">
</form>

Keywords

PHP web scraping DOM manipulation XPath data extraction

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