adding newlines (."\n") in code: good practice or not?

yahyac

Just curious what you professional php people do.

When coding html WITHIN a php script, do you append ."\n" to the end of appropriate html tags, thus making the next html tag start at another line?

example:

<?
   // we are already in this script for some reason or the other and need to make a html table
   echo '   <table>' . "\n";
   echo '      <tr>' . "\n";
   echo '         <td>blahblahblah</td>' . "\n";
   echo '      </tr>' . "\n";
   echo '   </table>' . "\n";
?>

Just curious if coders do this.

Thanks.

Installer

I usually leave them out completly, unless I need to read the HTML for troubleshooting (adding them only where needed). If you want to give the HTML output to a designer to work with, then you'll want to add the newlines. You don't need to add them quite that often, but that's up to you.

yahyac

Yeah. I'm just curious what most people do. I know everyone ideally focuses on the source code looking clean. But do people, in general (actual experienced php people) care about the final html code?

We'll see.

So we have a 1 for not using them.

bike5

I don't use them unless its for a specific reason (debugging) like Installer said.

Rodney_H_

I use the newline characters to make clean, eay-to-read code.

I mean, you guys write code right? Php is a language that produces XML and HTML, etc. Right?

It is a tool to produce the code presented to the browser.

A script might run well, but what if you forget to close a tag in your while loop? If there are a hundred records could you find the missing closing tag? Your XHTML won't validate, and then what?

I say you guys are LAZY for not caring about how your PHP outputs HTML.

Now, of course this is my preference coming from a designer background and then learning programming... 🙂

Installer

Someone told me once never to show programming code to a designer because he might learn to read it, and if he learns to read it he'll want to change vocations. 🙂

Lazy?

bike5

Even better!

<?
   // we are already in this script for some reason or the other and need to make a html table
   echo "\t" . '<table>' . "\n";
   echo "\t" . "\t" . '<tr>' . "\n";
   echo "\t" . "\t" . "\t" . '<td>' . "\n";
   echo "\t" . "\t" . "\t" . "\t" . 'blahblahblah' . "\n";
   echo "\t" . "\t" . "\t" . '</td>' . "\n";
   echo "\t" . "\t" . '</tr>' . "\n";
   echo "\t" . '</table>' . "\n";
?>

yahyac

To be honest, that last one is harder to read.

Just an opinion.

bike5

yahyac wrote:
To be honest, that last one is harder to read.

Just an opinion.

Was a joke... 😉

yahyac

as I said, slow on the uptake today. you had me for a while.

🙂

NogDog

I graduated from the school of hard knocks, and therefore I know anything I code is going to have bugs in it. I find the bit of extra effort I put in intially to do things such as checking return values, verifying input parameters are valid, and making sure the resulting HTML source is easy to read will ultimately save me time in the long run. I mean, how many times do we see people posting here with the "invalid resource ID" error message, where if they'd simply checked the return value of their mysql_query() call and handled FALSE results appropriately, they would have known right away where the problem was?

Note that using the "heredoc" method of echoing multiple lines of output can save you a lot of keystrokes, since you don't have to type all those linefeeds and backslashes for escaped quotes within the content.

Piranha

Am I the only person that tries to separate html and php as much as possible? Like this:

<?php
   for ($i = 0; $i < 5; $i++) {
   ?>
      <table>
         <tr>
            <td>
                <?php echo $i; ?>
            </td>
         </tr>
      </table>
   <?php
   }
?>

Then I get a clean html-output that is formatted correctly. It should be pretty easy for a designer to do his thing to the code as well, the only thing he need to worry about is not to change anything inside the "<?php ?>" blocks. I also get a php-code where I don't have to worry about echoing the html-code.

If I have other programming stuff (like database access) I put that either in the top of the file or in a separate file to make sure that the code is clean.

I am not that experienced with php, knows more about other programming languages. It seems to work pretty well, but can someone please comment on this way of programming with php?

NogDog

Piranha wrote:
Am I the only person that tries to separate html and php as much as possible?...

Or:

<?php
for ($i = 0; $i < 5; $i++) 
{
   echo <<<EOD
      <table>
         <tr>
            <td>
               $i
            </td>
         </tr>
      </table>
EOD;
}
?>

Rodney_H_

NogDog wrote:
I graduated from the school of hard knocks, and therefore I know anything I code is going to have bugs in it. I find the bit of extra effort I put in intially to do things such as checking return values, verifying input parameters are valid, and making sure the resulting HTML source is easy to read will ultimately save me time in the long run. I mean, how many times do we see people posting here with the "invalid resource ID" error message, where if they'd simply checked the return value of their mysql_query() call and handled FALSE results appropriately, they would have known right away where the problem was?

Note that using the "heredoc" method of echoing multiple lines of output can save you a lot of keystrokes, since you don't have to type all those linefeeds and backslashes for escaped quotes within the content.

Well said...