Question

I am trying to build my own simple template handler to easily be able to nest and combine files into variables and call these variables when neccessary, as shown below:

$partial['header'] = 'header.php';

foreach($partial as $part => $view ) {
    $output[$name] = file_get_contents( APPPATH .'views/' . $view . '.php' );
}

extract($output, EXTR_PREFIX_ALL, 'template' );

include 'mytemplate.php';

The mytemplate.php template file:

<?php
echo $template_header; // Shows the header. 

The question:
Obviously, loading a PHP file by file_get_contents isn’t going to call any PHP code inside the loaded file and I am sure that there’s better options available then using eval. What should I change to be able to use PHP inside my template files?

Answer 1

More ugly is possible but doing exactly what you’re wanting :

function custom_get_content($filename){
    if (is_file($filename)) {
        ob_start();
        include $filename;
        $contents = ob_get_contents();
        ob_end_clean();
        return $contents;
    }
}

Then you can call it :

foreach($partial as $part => $view ) {
    $output[$name] = custom_get_content( APPPATH .'views/' . $view . '.php' );
}

I copied that from a comment in the PHP manual but can’t find it anymore (and that’s why maybe it’s too ugly :D)