Question

I am storing HTML layouts within a MySQL database. These layouts may contain tags within the HTML as show below..

{site.poll="fred,joe,john"}

and

{site.layout.header}

Currently i am searching the HTML template by executing multiple preg_matches to identify the tags, looping through the array then executing a str_replace(), replacing with another partial html template also pulled back from the db.. Example below..

  if (preg_match_all('/{site\.layout\.(.)*}/', $data, $match) != FALSE)
  {
     foreach($match[0] as $value)
     {
        $value = trim($value, '{}');

        $tmp_store   = explode('.', $value);
        $tmp_partial = $this->parse($this->get_layout(end($tmp_store)));
        $data        = str_replace('{'. $value .'}', $tmp_partial, $data);
     }
  }

I would need to execute a regex for each tag i required, then execute a str_replace on each instance of that tag.. The same again would need doing for each required partial template..
To me, this is all seeming to get heavy..

Is there a better way of doing this?

Thanks in advance..

Edit: I do not want to use an existing library, i would like to do this task myself and learn in the process..

Answer 1

I don’t expect this to answer your question as such, but thought it might give you something else to think about. Some code I’ve got for when my template class is overkill.

function replace_tags(&$xhtml, $tags) {
    if( is_array($tags) && count($tags) > 0 )
        foreach ($tags as $tag => $data) {
            $xhtml = str_replace("{{" . $tag . "}}", $data, $xhtml);
        }

    if( $xhtml ) return $xhtml;
}

$tpl = "/templates/index.xhtml";
$tags = array(
    "css"             => null,
    "js"              => null,
    "main_content"    => null
);

$tags['main_content'] = file_get_contents("/home/main.xhtml");

echo replace_tags(file_get_contents($tpl), $tags);

edit

Thought I’d clarify on the reason the function receives $xhtml by reference, and also returns $xhtml. Basically just to make it dual purpose.

//Usage at the end of a page
echo replace_tags(file_get_contents($tpl), $tags);

//Usage for template in template
$tags['menu'] = file_get_contents($menu_tpl);
replace_tags($tags['menu'], $tags);

echo replace_tags(file_get_contents($tpl), $tags);