Unusual code snippet - what is it?

Cinquecento

I was dismantling some code (imgresizer4) and came across this piece which builds and html string -

$html =<<< EHTML

....html code....

EHTML;

echo $html;

What is this EHTML thing and what does =<<< do?

Thanks

Ian

shu

I believe that's a here (<< ) document notation; and the EHTML designates the beginning and the ending of the incoming input. So, whatever comes between the EHTMLs will go into $html variable. Here document is commonly used on automating scripts that requires user interaction. Note that you can use whatever you want in the place of EHTML, as long as the beginning and ending match.

stolzyboy

yes shu is correct, it was derived from PERL, this is a perl example:

$TheLongString = << 'BLARG'; //whatever word you want
This is the first line,
And this is the second,
Which is followed by the third,
And so on, ad nauseum.
BLARG // same as top word

this allows you to print out the variable just like it looks without <br>'s and such

Cinquecento

Great - thanks a bunch you bunch,

I see in the code I was dissecting that PHP variable can be placed in the stream - how about conditional loops? Does PHP parse bits it recognises - or just variables?

Ian

feldon23

Originally posted by Cinquecento
Great - thanks a bunch you bunch,

I see in the code I was dissecting that PHP variable can be placed in the stream - how about conditional loops? Does PHP parse bits it recognises - or just variables?

Ian

I looked and looked but there does not seem to be a way to execute any code inside a heredoc construct.

So here's the kind of thing you would do:

$meta_title = dbread("meta", "title", $link);
$meta_description = dbread("meta", "description", $link);
$meta_keywords = dbread("meta", "keywords", $link);

$data = <<<QQQ
<html>
<head>
<TITLE>{$meta_title}</TITLE>
</head>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="{$meta_description}">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="{$meta_keywords}">
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">
<body BGCOLOR="#000000" TEXT="#ffffff" LINK="#EEEE00" VLINK="#FFAA00">
QQQ;

$fp = fopen("index.htm", "w+");
	fwrite($fp, $data);
fclose($fp);