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Asked: 2026-05-13T23:01:52+00:00

I am wondering if there is any technique out there for making HTML code

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I am wondering if there is any technique out there for making HTML code look good when printing that HTML (multiple lines) from a PHP function?

In particular, new lines and tabs. Obviously, I want the HTML tags behind-the-scenes to look good with the proper new lines and tabs. However, depending on when I call the PHP function that is printing the HTML, I might need to start the tabs at 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. I don’t want to have to pass the starting tab count to the PHP function that is printing the HTML.

So, does anyone know a general-purpose way to print HTML-friendly code with PHP? Or is there a design principle that I am missing that says, “Don’t print multiple HTML lines from a PHP function.” …

Thanks,

Steve

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Markup Cleanup

    There are some wonderful codetools out there that will cleanup (ie, adjust spacing) and repair (ie, close open tags).

    Tidy is one of the more popular html cleanup/repair tools. You can parse your script’s output through Tidy on-the-fly using php’s output buffers.

    Zend Dev Zone Intro – http://devzone.zend.com/article/761
    Tidy Docs in PHP Manual – http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.tidy.php

    And now, a trivial example, yay!

    <?php
ob_start();

echo '<div><b> messy</b> <div> <i>blarg</I></div>';
echo '  <div>code rawr!</div>';

$output = ob_get_clean();

$tidy = tidy_parse_string($output);
tidy_clean_repair($tidy);
echo $tidy;
?>

    Templating System

    You should be using a templating system to separate the logic (php code) and presentation (html/markup/etc) parts of your application.

    Using this practice has many advantages including, among other things, making your code easier to maintain and debug.

    This is a huge topic of discussion, and almost always goes into frameworks and MVC. There are thousands of resources, here are a few 😛

    Writing a Template System in PHP – http://www.codewalkers.com/c/a/Display-Tutorials/Writing-a-Template-System-in-PHP/
    Separation of Business Logic from Presentation Logic in Web Applications – http://www.paragoncorporation.com/ArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=21

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