[RESOLVED] Is it a style thing?

cluelessPHP

I've noticed most of you do this when using PHP to output HTML, I'm curious is it just a style thing or does it have a purpose?

$text = ''; // I don't like functions that directly output text, so we'll return it instead 

    // now we have our data organized by first letter of name, so... 
    foreach (range('A', 'B') as $letter)  // don't really need to store range as variable 
    { 
        $text .= "<h3>$letter</h3>" . "<br>"; 
        if(!empty($data[$letter])) 
        { 
            $text .= "<ul>\n"; 
            foreach($data[$letter] as $row) 
            { 
                $text .= "<li>{$row['name']}</li>\n"; 
            } 
            $text .= "</ul>\n"; 
        } 
    } 
    return $text;

NogDog

Which aspect of it outputting HTML are you referring to?

NogDog

If you're referring to my comment on the first line, one of the main reasons to use functions is so that they can be re-used. When you start outputting text from within a function, you tend to limit its re-usability, as I may not want to output to the browser at the time I want to call it (or maybe never at all). Therefore, by having it return its text, the code calling it at any time can choose to output it immediately...

echo my_function();

...or it can store it for later use or perhaps further modification...

$text = my_function();

...or it could even ignore the returned text if all it cares about is some other side-effect of the function...

my_function();

cluelessPHP

NogDog;11063079 wrote:
Which aspect of it outputting HTML are you referring to?

All of it, the example was something you wrote but weedpacket had also done something similar, I was under the impression it my be stylistic at first

<?php 
$functions = []; 
foreach(get_defined_functions()['internal'] as $func) 
{ 
    $functions[$func] = (new ReflectionFunction($func))->getExtensionName(); 
} 
ksort($functions); 
?> 
<!DOCTYPE html> 
<html> 
<head><title>The PHP functions I have installed</title> 
<script src='jquery-3.1.1.min.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 
<style type='text/css'> 
div.func { font-size:14pt;} 
#container { -moz-columns: 3 auto; height:100vw;} 
</style> 
</head> 
<body> 
<select id="extension" name="extension"> 
<?php 
$extensions = array_unique($functions); 
natcasesort($extensions); 
foreach($extensions as $extn) 
{ 
    printf('<option>%s</option>', $extn); 
} 
?> 
</select> 
<div id='container'> 
<?php 
foreach($functions as $func=>$extn) 
{ 
    printf('<div class="func %s" style="display:none">%s</div>', $extn, $func); 
} 
?> 
<script type="text/javascript"> 
$('.func').hide(); 
$('#extension').change(function(ev) 
{ 
    var extn = $($('#extension option:selected').first()).text(); 
    $('.func').slideUp(2000); 
    $('.' + extn).slideDown(2000); 
}); 
</script></div></body></html>

NogDog

Well, as always with PHP, TMTOWTDI, and which way I pick is situation-dependent. In general, though, I try as much as possible to keep the business logic and data processing separate from the HTML output. When you have lots of going back and forth between PHP expressions and HTML text, it's hard to follow the program logic. Then the other thing to deal with is quotes: double or single, when do I have to escape them, when do I have to double escape them by also escaping the escape character?! :eek:

Sometimes [man]heredoc[/man] string notation can help. Sometimes sprintf() and printf() can help by using their place-holders within the string coupled with the additional params for the actual values to replace them with. Sometimes exiting out of PHP mode helps, just using it when you need to echo a variable value. I think the main goal is do what you can to make your code readable and easy to debug, because in the "real world" (if there is such a thing), you end up spending a lot of time as a developer reading/debugging/modifying existing code -- including code you wrote a year ago and now you have no idea why you wrote it that way. 🙂

cluelessPHP

So mainly keep it tidy and readable?

NogDog;11063085 wrote:
including code you wrote a year ago and now you have no idea why you wrote it that way. 🙂

Last year? Don't you mean yesterday(twenty minutes ago give or take nineteen minutes)? For me at least :rolleyes:

dalecosp

cluelessPHP;11063089 wrote:
So mainly keep it tidy and readable?

Last year? Don't you mean yesterday(twenty minutes ago give or take nineteen minutes)? For me at least :rolleyes:

Well, kind of ... the issue with that being if you're being forced to go back and correct bugs after twenty minutes, I might wonder WTF I was doing writing the code in the first place.

But, then again, those WTF moments happen at work also ... often just after (or worse, during a meeting), or especially when the PHB shows up at your cubicle ...

I have gone through some stylistic 'periods' in my work. Lately, I've found myself doing a lot of this:

//code from a couple years back

if ( trim( $foo == 'some phrase' ) ) {
   $bar = 'blat';
   $long_var = 'something';
}

//this year's refactoring

if (trim($foo == 'some phrase')) {

   $bar      = 'blat';
   $long_var = 'something';
}

That's certainly about style ... but then, style IS about 'readable code'....

PS > Is there some justifiable reason that code blocks aren't monospaced here?

NogDog

I think there's also a nice synergy between trying to write "readable" code and trying to write clean, modular, DRY code.

dalecosp

NogDog;11063099 wrote:
I think there's also a nice synergy between trying to write "readable" code and trying to write clean, modular, DRY code.

It's often part of the same mind-set, for sure. Main problem here, I can bang out stuff that's not quite so readable a lot faster than I can create beautiful apps, and there's lots of time pressure applied :queasy:

NogDog

It's the perpetual battle between saving time now at the cost of more time later. 🙂

Weedpacket

For my code above, it was written recently enough that I can recall some of the thinking behind stylistic choices.

I was thinking of the list being dynamic. I wanted to illustrate that and decided an entire self-contained page would be the way to make that illustration work. (Nevertheless I still delegated to jQuery instead of writing my own animation code - how to animate lists in JavaScript wasn't the point.)

Being an entire page, I treated it as a "view"-type thing: minimal code that was little more than "here's a load of data prepared earlier - display it". There wasn't going to be a whole big templating thing because that would have distracted from the point the way hand-crafted JS animation would've.

And why printf()? The second use is

    printf('<div class="func %s" style="display:none">%s</div>', $extn, $func);

There are other ways of writing that:

<?php
echo '<div class="func ' . $extn . '" style="display:none">' . $func . '</div>';
echo "<div class=\"func $extn\" style=\"display:none\">$func</div>";
echo "<div class='func $extn' style='display:none'>$func</div>";
?><div class="func <?=$extn?>" style="display:none"><?=$func?></div><?php

And so on, but all made for more fiddly punctuation. Except maybe for the third.
Having chosen printf() for the second loop, consistency meant using it for the first as well.

cluelessPHP

Ah I think I get it now, will give it a try when I'm home

This would be a typical of made mistakes, I was shown the correct way but it is something I need to be more mindful of

http://board.phpbuilder.com/showthread.php?10395797-RESOLVED-Undefined-offset-0

Also I only write in my free time this week I'm delivering flour next week I'm recycling rubbish