Is my template parser shitty?

[xces]

Heya,

I pass $sRules in this form:
$sRules=array(array("<!--somevar-->", "This is some var"), array("<!--someothervar-->", "This is some other var"));

And i have this parser...

	function ProcessTemplate($sFileName, $sRules, $echo="1")
	{
		$temp="";
		$iRules=count($sRules);

	if (file_exists($sFileName)) {
		//Read file into array
		$sContents = file($sFileName);

		// Process array
		while (list($sLineNr, $sLine) = each($sContents)) {
			for ($iCurRule=0; $iCurRule<$iRules; $iCurRule++) {
				$sLine = str_replace($sRules[$iCurRule][0], $sRules[$iCurRule][1], $sLine);
			}

			// Echo if needed, else buffer it :)
			if ($echo=="1") {
				echo $sLine;
			} else {
				$temp.=$sLine;
			}
		}
	}

	if ($echo!="1") {
		return $temp;
	}		
}

Maybe regular expressions are faster? Some tips on improving this baby>?

[brianl]

Regular expressions aren't faster. In fact, they're very much slower. Even the PCRE. Feel free to try bTemplate: http://www.massassi.com/bTemplate/

Also, there are some benchmarks that compare the various template engines: http://www.massassi.com/bTemplate/benchmarks/