Question

I’m working on a code to generate a php file.

This is example of my code to write the php file

$myFile = "testFile.php";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w+') or die("can't open file");

$data = '<?php'. "\n\n";

$data.= '$datetime = date("Y-m-d H:i:s");'. "\n\n";

$data.= '$_POST = array_map(\'mysql_real_escape_string\', $_POST);'. "\n\n";

$data.= '?>';

fwrite($fh, $data);
fclose($fh);

This code works fine. My question is there any smarter way to write a php code into a file? For example i have this function i would like to write into the php file. It would be very tedious to write all the function line by line like what i’m doing right now.

function shorten_url($url)
{       
    $longUrl = $url;

    $apiKey = 'your_api_key_here';      

    $postData = array('longUrl' => $longUrl, 'key' => $apiKey);
    $jsonData = json_encode($postData);

    $curlObj = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://www.googleapis.com/urlshortener/v1/url');
    curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
    curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
    curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-type:application/json'));
    curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    curl_setopt($curlObj, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $jsonData);

    $response = curl_exec($curlObj);

    $json = json_decode($response);

    curl_close($curlObj);

    $tiny_url = $json->id;

    if(($response!=FALSE)&&(!empty($tiny_url)))
    {
        return $tiny_url;
    }
    else
    {
        return false;
    }       

}

Answer 1

If you have PHP >= 5.3, using the nowdoc syntax for this would be much more convenient:

$data = <<<'EOD'
<?php
$datetime = date("Y-m-d H:i:s");
$_POST = array_map('mysql_real_escape_string', $_POST);
?>
EOD;

echo htmlspecialchars($data);