Best Practices: working with long, multiline strings in PHP?

Viewed 135 times

Note: I'm sorry if this is an extremely simple question but I'm somewhat obsessive compulsive over the formatting of my code.

I have a class that has a function that returns a string that will make up the body text of an email. I want this text formatted so it looks right in the email, but also so it doesn't make my code look funky. Here's what I mean:

class Something
{
    public function getEmailText($vars)
    {
        $text = 'Hello ' . $vars->name . ",

The second line starts two lines below.

I also don't want any spaces before the new line, so it's butted up against the left side of the screen.";
        return $text;
    }
}

but it could also be written as:

public function getEmailText($vars)
{
    $text = "Hello {$vars->name},nrThe second line starts two lines below.nrI also don't want any spaces before the new line, so it's butted up against the left side of the screen.";
    return $text;
}

but what's the deal with new lines and carriage returns? What's the difference? Is nn the equivalent of rr or nr? Which should I use when I'm creating a line gap between lines?

Then there's the option of output buffering and heredoc syntax.

How do you deal with using long multiline strings in your objects?

Answers

You should use heredoc or nowdoc.

$var = "some text";
$text = <<<EOT
  Place your text between the EOT. It's
  the delimiter that ends the text
  of your multiline string.
  $var
EOT;

The difference between heredoc and nowdoc is that PHP code embedded in a heredoc gets executed, while PHP code in nowdoc will be printed out as is.

$var = "foo";
$text = <<<'EOT'
  My $var
EOT;

In this case $text will have the value "My $var", not "My foo".

Notes:

Before the closing EOT; there should be no spaces or tabs. otherwise you will get an error.
The string/tag (EOT) that enclose the text is arbitrary, that is, one can use other strings, e.g. <<<FOO and FOO;
EOT : End of transmission, EOD: End of data. ^[Q]

Thursday, September 15, 2022

namambwefatina-771091cbaa9f

You need a Ajax call to pass the JS value into php variable

JS Code will be (your js file)

var jsString="hello";
$.ajax({
    url: "ajax.php",
    type: "post",
    data: jsString
});

And in ajax.php (your php file) code will be

$phpString = $_POST['data'];     // assign hello to phpString

Thursday, November 10, 2022

mrvaldez

alert('my name is: <?php echo $man; ?>' );

Friday, August 19, 2022

rod_hyde

Since you want to remove any horizontal whitespace from a Unicode string you need to use

h regex escape ("any horizontal whitespace character (since PHP 5.2.4)")
u modifier (see Pattern Modifiers)

Use

$txt = preg_replace("/^h+/mu", '', $txt);

Details

^ - start of a line (m modifier makes ^ match all line start positions, not just string start position)
h+ - one or more horizontal whitespaces
u modifier will make sure the Unicode text is treated as a sequence of Unicode code points, not just code units, and will make all regex escapes in the pattern Unicode aware.

Saturday, November 12, 2022

matthew_scharley

A potential use-case for ZFS that would see thousands of filesystem mounts would be an organization that uses ZFS for NFS-mounted home directories. Imagine a large company or small university with zpools dedicated to home directory exports. Each user could have a dedicated ZFS filesystem with separate quotas and parameters. If rolling snapshots are implemented, it would be possible for users to see previous versions of their files by descending into the ~/.zfs/snapshot directory. Self-service restores!

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

luze

Only authorized users can answer the search term. Please sign in first, or register a free account.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged :

php

string

Best Practices: working with long, multiline strings in PHP?

Answers

php,string