Question

I am having trouble reading in a file and using it as a template in PHP. A portion of my code is pasted below. For some reason it never finds $$USER_NAME$$ in the string so it never replaces. I also pasted the beginning part of my template below.

$filename = "email/templates/welcome.txt";
$file = fopen($filename, "r")   
$body = fread($file, filesize($filename));
fclose($file);
$body = str_replace("$$USER_NAME$$", "John Doe", $body);
print($body);

Template:

<p>
   <img src="emailPic" alt="Logo" />
</p>
<p>Dear $$USER_NAME$$,</p>
<p>Thank you for registering to attend $$EVENT_NAME$$. We look forward to helping you reach your networking goals at $$EVENT_SHORT_NAME$$.
</p>...

Any ideas about why it wouldn’t find $$USER_NAME$$ in the template?

Answer 1

Try with single quotes:

$body = str_replace('$$USER_NAME$$', 'John Doe', $body);

otherwise the $ signs get interpreted by PHP (just try to do echo "$$USER_NAME$$" to understand that PHP will interpret it as echo $$USER_NAME."$$" or something similar).

You can as well resolve the problem by escaping the $ if you still want to use double quotes:

$body = str_replace("\$\$USER_NAME\$\$", "John Doe", $body);

Check the PHP manual page on Strings to know what are the differences between single quoted and double quoted strings in PHP.