Quicker way of spitting out HTML

karlovac

I saw somewhere recently a more elegant way of spitting out html in PHP.

Normally I would put the HTML into a string, and then echo it out to a page.

But that means that I have to build strings, which is a pain.

Is there some way of being able to keep blocks of HTML together (so you don't have to keep concatanating line by line with escaped line breaks)?

Thanks,

Antun

Anon

Yes!!!

instead of:
echo "<TR><TD>blah </TD></TR>";
echo "<TR><TD>blah </TD></TR>";
echo "<TR><TD>blah </TD></TR>";
echo "<TR><TD>blah </TD></TR>";
echo "<TR><TD>blah </TD></TR>";
echo "<TR><TD>blah </TD></TR>";
echo "<TR><TD>blah </TD></TR>";
echo "<TR><TD>blah </TD></TR>";

Go exactly like this:
echo <<<EOD
<table><TR><TD>blah blah blah</TD></TR>
<TR><TD>blah blah blah</TD></TR>
<TR><TD>blah blah blah</TD></TR>
<TR><TD>blah blah blah</TD></TR>
<TR><TD>blah blah blah</TD></TR>
<TR><TD>blah blah blah</TD></TR>
<TR><TD>lots of crap here</TD></TR>
<TR><TD> more html stuff blah blah blah blah going on forever and ever </TD></TR>
</table>
EOD;

Okay?

start your string with
echo <<<EOD

and end it with
EOD;

...and follow the punctuation EXACTLY as I showed you.

Anon

Alternatively, for large blocks of pure html, you can escape php completely. You have to decide through benchmarking if it's best to do this.

Anon

just dropout of PHP:

<?
// PHPcode here
?>

HTML code here

<?
// PHPcode here
?>

karlovac

Thanks, that's exactly it.

Is there also some similar way of assigning a block of HTML to a variable, (complete with line breaks, tabs, whitespace) but without concatenation.

Antun

karlovac

But then I have no control over the HTML code gets printed. What I was looking for was some way of saying

if some case
<html tags a plenty>
</html tags a plenty>
Else
<lots of other html>
</lots of other html>

So that the HTML code was still tidy you see.

Take care,

Antun

Anon

if (some case)
{ ?>
html goes here
and her
<?php
}else
{ ?>
other html goes here
and here
<?php
}

just remember to close php (?>) immediately after the opening brace ({) and not on the next line, and open php (<?php) on a new line to keep the html flowing