PHP

I’ve been an advocate of seperating logic from presentation for a long time now. But after working on a few large PHP projects lately, I’ve decided that I need to have loops in my template class, it’s too time conusming creating seperate templates to be placed inside loops.

I started off by defining a readable syntax for the loops inside my templates.

<@loop(contacts)
{
<p>Name: {name}<br />
Sex: {sex}</p>
}
@>

‘contacts’ would be the name of the array I’m going to loop through.

Here is the function that will process the loop. Simply pass a string containing the loop, and it will return the output.


<?php
    function parseLoop($loop)
    {
        $loop_result = '';
        
        
        // get the name of the loop
        
        preg_match('/loop((.*))/', $loop, $loop_name);
        
        
        // get the loop contents
        
        preg_match('/{(.*)}/s', $loop, $loop_contents);
                    
                                            
        // get all the vars from loop_contents
        
        preg_match_all('/{(.*)}/', $loop_contents[1], $vars);
        
        
        // loop through the global array
        
        foreach($arrays[$loop_name[1]] as $item)
        {
            
            $loop_item = $loop_contents[1];
                            
            
            // loop through every variable found, and replace it with its value in the global array
            
            foreach($vars[1] as $var)
            {
                $loop_item = @str_replace('{'.$var.'}', $item[$var], $loop_item);
            }        
            
            $loop_result .= $loop_item;
        }
                
        return $loop_result;
        
    }
?>



And here is the array containing the contacts.


<?php
    $arrays = array('contacts' = array(
                            array('name' => 'jane', 'sex' => 'f'),
                            array('name' => 'bob', 'sex' => 'm')
                            );
?>



To use the function you need to find the loops in the templates using regular expressions, pass it through parseLoop(), then replace the loop block with the output.

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