Tag: string

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The range() function

Thursday, July 30th, 2009 | Loop | chris

I came across the range function a few months ago, and it has saved so many lines of repetitive code. I got so tired of using for loops to do the most simple things.

Check out a few examples to see how this function can make your life so much easier.

Print all numbers from a to z:

foreach(range('a', 'z') as $letter) {
    echo $letter;
}

Print all numbers from 0 to 12

foreach(range(0, 12) as $number) {
    echo $number;
}

Print all numbers from 0 to 100, but only showing every 10th one.

foreach(range(0, 100, 10) as $number) {
    echo $number;
}
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Quick and dirty template system

Monday, July 27th, 2009 | Strings, Templates | chris

Before I knew about Smarty, I developed me own way of having HTML templates for the projects I developed. Admittedly, I still use it even though Smarty is so much more powerful. When I don’t need the versatility of Smarty, I just use my own method.

I started off by having a template directory with HTML files in it. These files consist of all the HTML code I want, and has placeholders to where content will be.

<html>
<body>
<div>%header%</div>
<div>
  <div>%menu%</div>
  <div>%content%</div>
</div>
<div>%footer%</div>
</body>
</html>

As you can see, I have 4 place holders there, %header%, %menu%, %content% and %footer.

Now all I have to do is use str_replace to replace the place holders with content.

Here is an example of doing that

  $html = file_get_contents("template.html");
 
  $menu = "<ul><li>Option 1</li><li>Option 2</li></ul>";
  $header = "<h1>This is the Header</h1><br />%menu%";
  $content = "<p>This is some content.</p>";
  $footer = "<small>This is the footer</small>";
 
  $html = str_replace("%header%",$header,$html);
  $html = str_replace("%menu%",$menu,$html);
  $html = str_replace("%content%",$content,$html);
  $html = str_replace("%footer%",$footer,$html);
  echo $html;

As you can see, I make use of the placeholder within another placeholder as well. So the %menu% is also replace within the $header variable. Just note if you want to use it like that, you need to order the str_replace so that it will get replaced.

The resulting HTML will be:

<html>
<body>
<div><h1>This is the Header</h1><br /><ul><li>Option 1</li><li>Option 2</li></ul></div>
<div>
  <div><ul><li>Option 1</li><li>Option 2</li></ul></div>
  <div><p>This is some content.</p></div>
</div>
<div><small>This is the footer</small></div>
</body>
</html>
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