[thelist] PHP inside or outside?

[Richard Livsey]

Marek Kilimajer wrote:

> Another thing I would note that php inside html tends to output 
> nicer html output.
> 
> That said, I'm fan of php inside html. :-)

If you want nicer output (and also better readability), then you can use 
the heredoc syntax.
http://www.php.net/types.string

Eg:

$html=<<<EOD
<div>
    <h1><a href="/">Title</a></h1>
    <p>
       This is some content nicely formatted. <br />
       We dont have to bother about escaping ' or " in here <br />
       Plus everything comes out as typed, all tabs etc all preserved.
    </p>
    <p>
       Complex variables can be entered using {$this->someVar} syntax
    </p>
</div>
EOD;

Personally I'm a fan of jumping out of PHP as little as possible and use 
templates (http://smarty.php.net) for anything involving substantial 
amounts of HTML.

<rant>
I'm amazed at the amount of PHP I have seen which has the following 
style of code:

$html = "<a href=\"/\">this is a link - $var</a>\n";
$html .="<p>Some more text</p>\n";
$htmp .="<p id=\"x\"><a href=\"/asdf.htm\" class=\"woo\"$var2 </p>\n";

Which could be much better replaced by a heredoc style bit of code which 
would increase readability, output, speed (taking out all the string 
concatenations), ease of coding (if you miss one \" you have a bug)....
<rant />

-- 
R.Livsey
Incutio Web Developer
www.livsey.org
www.incutio.com