Question

I have some HTML that I need to sometimes wrap in an anchor tag when a condition is met. I could do something like this:

<?php
    $html = '<div>my html</div>';
    if ($condition):
?>
    <a href="http://google.com"><?php echo $html ?></a>
<?php else: ?>
    <?php echo $html ?>
<?php endif; ?>

…but I don’t want to have to wrap my html in quotes to turn it into a string. This is for two reasons: syntax highlighting goes away, and its harder to maintain.

How can I do something like the following?

<!-- pseudo code -->
<?php if ($condition): echo $this->wrapWithLinkTo('http://google.com', ?>
    <div>my html</div>
<?php ); endif; ?>

…so that the end result would be:

<!-- when $condition is true -->
<a href="http://google.com"><div>my html</div></a>

<!-- when $condition is false -->
<div>my html</div>

Answer 1

Use Output buffering!

<?php ob_start(); ?>
<div>my html</div>
<?php

$html = ob_get_clean();

if ($condition):
?>
    <a href="http://google.com"><?php echo $html ?></a>
<?php else: ?>
    <?php echo $html ?>
<?php endif; ?>

PHP’s output buffering is used to capture output from PHP code, HTML mode, or anything, and then either store it to a variable and not output it to the client (ob_get_clean()), store it into a variable and also send it to the client(ob_get_flush()), or do a whole bunch of other things with it! (ob_* functions)