Question

I’m storing HTML content in a MySQL field with a text data type, and I’m using ckeditor as a WYSIWYG editor to create the HTML that is being stored in MySQL. I’m looking for a way for a user to put some kind of string that I could look for and replace with calling an include file. For example:

// This string contains the text pulled from mysql
$pageContent = "<p>This page contains a calendar of events</p> {{calendar}} <p>Choose a date or scroll through days to view events.</p>";

// Function needed that changes {{calendar}} to bring in my script calendar.php like include('calendar.php');
// Note that in this example I want to call my script that does the calendar stuff, but maybe I have a script to do a photo gallery which could be {{photogallery}}, or news {{news}}, or whatever...

// Print the $pageContent including the calendar.php contents here
print $pageContent;

Answer 1

Here’s a little something that will take your text (in this case, $pageContent) and an array of parameters (ie array(‘calendar’ => ‘calendar.php’)) and include the necessary file. It is currently untested, but should get you in the right direction.

function parseTemplate($templateText, $params)
{
    foreach ($params as $key => $value)
    {
        ob_start();
        include($value);
        $includeContents = ob_get_contents();
        ob_end_clean();
        $templateText = str_replace('{{'.$key.'}}', $includeContents, $templateText);
    }
    return $templateText;
}

Usage in your case would be the following:

// This string contains the text pulled from mysql
$pageContent = "<p>This page contains a calendar of events</p> {{calendar}} <p>Choose a date or scroll through days to view events.</p>";

$params = array('calendar' => 'calendar.php');
$pageContent = parseTemplate($pageContent, $params);

// print the $pageContent including the calendar.php contents here
print $pageContent;

You could also use the same idea for simply replacing text instead of including files:

function parseTemplateText($templateText, $params)
{
    foreach ($params as $key => $value)
    {
        $templateText = str_replace('{{'.$key.'}}', $value, $templateText);
    }
    return $templateText;
}