I figured out a cool trick for PHP. I've always noticed that the templating engines fall down when you begin to write subroutines. In other words, if you want to return string output from a function rather than immediately printing that as the function runs, you must use string concatenation rather than PHP's templates.
For example:
$string = tester();
print "this will print second<br>";
print $string; //will do nothing
function tester(){
?>
this will print first.
<?php
}
But you can use PHP's nifty output buffering to save up all the template output within the subroutine like so:
$string = tester();
print "this will now be first<br>";
print $string;
function tester(){
ob_start();
?>
this will be second.
<?php
$ret = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
return $ret;
}
Nifty, huh?
Dated: 09/04/2002