Question

I’m working on a custom CMS that has some built-in modules (calendar, weather, etc.) that we would like to allow end users to insert into their content. They can enter content using the CKEDITOR.

Looking for some tips on:

1. What is a recommended syntax for entering these codes? We need to retrieve module name and any relevant parameters. Was thinking something like: {{module-name, width=100, height=200, items=5}}
2. What PHP functions are best for parsing these?

I know there some templating libraries that may provide this type of functionality, but at this point we want to try to build this part ourselves.

Answer 1

Pick any syntax that will not find accidental use elsewhere in your project. Double curly brackets is probably fine.

Use a regular expression with non-greedy matching to grab the guts of each

$matches = array();
preg_match("/\{\{(.*?)\}\}/", $content, $matches);

// or use the match all the grab all of them
preg_match_all("/\{\{(.*?)\}\}/", $content, $matches);

from there, you can simply split them by comma and process the individual tokens

$tokens = split(",", $module);
$module_name = array_shift($tokens);
foreach ($tokens as $token) {
    // process the token
}