Question

I am pretty new to PHP, but I have a fair idea about how it works.
My question is this: is it possible to have something like %username%, in HTML, and when PHP recognises this text, it will output a username?
Ie: turn the %username% to the actual username?

How would this be done, or how does it work?

Thanks for all help in advance!

Answer 1

This usually done through Template Engines like Smarty for example. See the next definition from smarty.net

What’s a template engine and why should I use one?

Smarty is a template engine for PHP. More specifically, it facilitates
a managable way to separate application logic and content from its
presentation. This is best described in a situation where the
application programmer and the template designer play different roles,
or in most cases are not the same person. For example, let’s say you
are creating a web page that is displaying a newspaper article. The
article headline, tagline, author and body are content elements, they
contain no information about how they will be presented. They are
passed into Smarty by the application, then the template designer
edits the templates and uses a combination of HTML tags and template
tags to format the presentation of these elements (HTML tables,
background colors, font sizes, style sheets, etc.) One day the
programmer needs to change the way the article content is retrieved (a
change in application logic.) This change does not affect the template
designer, the content will still arrive in the template exactly the
same. Likewise, if the template designer wants to completely redesign
the templates, this requires no changes to the application logic.
Therefore, the programmer can make changes to the application logic
without the need to restructure templates, and the template designer
can make changes to templates without breaking application logic.

and there are many other template engines other than smarty, just google for it.