PHP Software Developing » template http://www.phpdeveloping.co.za for the love of PHP Development Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:38:14 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Quick and dirty template system http://www.phpdeveloping.co.za/strings/quick-and-dirty-template-system.html http://www.phpdeveloping.co.za/strings/quick-and-dirty-template-system.html#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2009 07:41:12 +0000 chris http://www.phpdeveloping.co.za/?p=84 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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