PHP: Printing HTML-Friendly Code?

Question

Hi All,

I am wondering if there is any technique out there for making HTML code look good when printing that HTML (multiple lines) from a PHP function?

In particular, new lines and tabs. Obviously, I want the HTML tags behind-the-scenes to look good with the proper new lines and tabs. However, depending on when I call the PHP function that is printing the HTML, I might need to start the tabs at 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. I don't want to have to pass the starting tab count to the PHP function that is printing the HTML.

So, does anyone know a general-purpose way to print HTML-friendly code with PHP? Or is there a design principle that I am missing that says, "Don't print multiple HTML lines from a PHP function." ...

Thanks,

Steve

Answer 1

I wouldn't bother. With DOM-inspection tools like Firebug readily available, there's no point wasting time on making something designed for a computer to read look good. See this question for other people's opinions on the matter too.

Answer 2

Generating your HTML using a template system, and keeping your templates in order is a simple way of doing this

Answer 3

Markup Cleanup

There are some wonderful codetools out there that will cleanup (ie, adjust spacing) and repair (ie, close open tags).

Tidy is one of the more popular html cleanup/repair tools. You can parse your script's output through Tidy on-the-fly using php's output buffers.

Zend Dev Zone Intro - http://devzone.zend.com/article/761 Tidy Docs in PHP Manual - http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.tidy.php

And now, a trivial example, yay!

<?php
ob_start();

echo '<div><b> messy</b> <div> <i>blarg</I></div>';
echo '  <div>code rawr!</div>';

$output = ob_get_clean();

$tidy = tidy_parse_string($output);
tidy_clean_repair($tidy);
echo $tidy;
?>

Templating System

You should be using a templating system to separate the logic (php code) and presentation (html/markup/etc) parts of your application.

Using this practice has many advantages including, among other things, making your code easier to maintain and debug.

This is a huge topic of discussion, and almost always goes into frameworks and MVC. There are thousands of resources, here are a few :P

Writing a Template System in PHP - http://www.codewalkers.com/c/a/Display-Tutorials/Writing-a-Template-System-in-PHP/
Separation of Business Logic from Presentation Logic in Web Applications - http://www.paragoncorporation.com/ArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=21

Answer 4

You shouldn't be printing html with php. Use php's shorthand syntax inside of a template.

<h1><?= $page_title ?></h1>
<p><?= page_content ?></p>

instead of

<?php

echo "<h1>" . $page_title . "</h1>";
echo "<p>" . $page_content . "</p>";

?>

Answer 5

if you're generating valid xhtml, you can buffer your output and at the end, do that:

$dom = new DomDocument (('1.0', 'utf-8');
$dom->loadHtml (ob_get_clean ());
$dom->formatOutput = true; 
echo $dom->saveXML ();

if you're using a framework you can probably make this work as a plugin or filter. this way it's also work if you embed template into other template or use output from helper