Variables in imported files

fross

hi there,

I'm trying to import a file (with fread()) with "holders" for variables in it, to be outputted using echo, with the variable values in it. The purpose of this is to be able to read in HTML templates which then get populated with the values in them. Let me illustrate:

reader.php:
<?
$variable = "foobar!";

$filename = "htmltemplate.html";
$fp = fopen($filename,"r");
$contents = fread($fp, filesize($filename));
echo "$contents";
fclose($fp);
?>

htmltemplate.html:
<tags>$variable</tags>

what i would expect to be the output of reader.php is "<tags>foobar!</tags>", as that would be the output of echo "<tags>$variable</tags>";

so i guess this variable substitution on execution of echo doesn't work in this instance. Does anyone know a way this can be made to work? I used to do it in perl with some regular expressions, but that was messy and i'm hoping someone has done something like this already 🙂

thanks in advance,

david

Anon

Sorry but by using fread you don't get the benefits of the PHP parser running on your imported code. If you chose to use include instead then your above code would work. The way most template systems work is to use regular expressions to change some set type of text into the contents of the variable that you want.

I haven't tried this but instead of echoing the contents you could eval them. Eval is suppose to treat whats passed to it as PHP code to be parsed.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.eval.php

Anon

okay, this is what i was trying to do and what i got to work. hope it helps:

i have a few content files that will never change aside from very minor things which i identified with variables. so i wanted to make a call to them and assign them to a variable. i opened a pipe and read the file and assigned it to a variable. this seemed to work but the imported file would not be parsed by the php engine so when printed, variables that where in the file stayed as variables, not content.

so this is what i did. instead of having a variable set from a file that was read, i made the include files php, and then just included it in the script using the include() function when that content was called for. and this seems to have cleared everything up. so going by your example, it should look like this:

php file:

<?
$variable = "foobar!";
include "htmltemplate.html";
echo "$contents";
?>

include file:

<?
$contents = "<tags>$variable</tags>";
?>

note: be sure to escape any " marks in the include file.

sepodati

Using eval() will get what you want. Read the file into a string $contents like you are doing, then:

eval("\$eval_contents = \"$contents\";");
echo $eval_contents;

That will work...

I use this for mail templates. The user can edit simple text files and place whatever they want in them, arrange the variables however, and then I eval() it to get the text and send it off...

---John Holmes...