String containing {{calendar}} but need it to call calendar.php

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;

PHP's already a templating system. And this has been done many times over in other templating systems built on top of PHP, e.g. smarty. You dawg... we put some templates in your templating system so you can template while you're templating. — Marc B, Nov 14 '12 at 14:54

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 14 '12 at 15:03

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;
}

String containing {{calendar}} but need it to call calendar.php

1 Answers1