Terminating "Here Document" with whitespace

jon3k

Ok, so the following is valid:

<?
$var1="hello";
$var2="goodbye";
print <<<END
$var1, how are you doing?<BR>
Thanks for visiting<BR>
<A HREF="http://www.google.com/">Google</A>
<BR><BR>
See you soon, $var2!
END;
?>

But! This will return a parse error:

<?
$var1="hello";
$var2="goodbye";
print <<<END
$var1, how are you doing?<BR>
Thanks for visiting<BR>
<A HREF="http://www.google.com/">Google</A>
<BR><BR>
See you soon, $var2!
   END;
?>

Because the here document terminator ( END; ) is not against the left margin.

This means, I cannot indent my outputs using this style.

Anyone know of any way to overcome this limitation?

EricC

jon3k from clubsi? if so its a small internet after all..

not sure if there is a away to overcome that. According to the manual heredocs must be terminated with the indentifier appearing in the first column. good luck!

jon3k

Busted 😃 Yeah, its me.

I saw the note in the php docs, I was hoping someone had found some kind of workaround (like matching the indentation in the terminator definition with the ACTUAL terminator or something).

Anyone else wanna take a stab at it?

kburger

Originally posted by jon3k
...I was hoping someone had found some kind of workaround (like matching the indentation in the terminator definition with the ACTUAL terminator or something)....

I actually tried that very thing as soon as I saw your post. No good. No workaround that I see, other than not using the HEREDOC format.

Weedpacket

Why would a "workaround" even be necessary? If you want a line of whitespace characters at the end of your string, just put them is as usual:

$string = <<<EOF
ef oiwjf oijwoiji  wjwf 
efoijiowofijw foiw oowiow foie gras
lorem thingummy foo bar
And some spaces and tabs:

EOF;

If you're worried about the newline on the end, the newline immediately after the first EOF and immediately before the last EOF are gobbled and don't become part of the string.

jon3k

Maybe I didn't explain the problem well enough.

I want to be able to indent a print() statement using heredoc syntax. You cannot indent the terminator ( END; ). It must appear on column 1 (against the left margin).