In some cases where you are working with pages that are being included themselves, sometimes for debugging or sharing reasons, you may need to use include_once or require_once to easily make sure you aren’t duplicating data or overwriting old data or classes that you are depending on. Include once will check if something has been included before, and then if not it will include that file.
Here are the sources used in this tutorial:
include.php
<?php //Included file echo "Happy pancakes!"; ?>
tut016.php
<?php //PHP Tutorial 016 include("include.php"); include_once("include.php"); ?>