How do you comment html templates in Php (in a practical way) ?

Question

Is there a simple solution to do the equivalent of Java's comments:

<%-- this is a comment inside a template, it does not appear in the output HTML --%>

Even if you use short php tags, you still have to wrap the comments with comment syntax, on top of the php tags:

<? /* this is a comment of the html template */ ?>

I'm considering doing some kind of filter on the output templates, to remove all html comments, or better yet, custom comments like the Java syntax above, but how would you do that in the most efficient way? You'd have to run a regexp right?

The reason for my question is simply that in a MVC framrwork, using components, and re-usable html templates (think YUI), I need to document clearly those templates, in a readable way..

Answer 1

Shouldn't these work?

<? # This is a comment ?>
<? // This is a comment too ?>

That's not too verbose is it?

Answer 2

Triptych is correct for inside of php tags. outside, <!-- Comment here --> still works.

Answer 3

Not that I know of, but the short-tag plus the block comments are very easy - about as easy to type as the JSP comments you mentioned above:

<?/* This is a comment */?>

or even

<?// this is a comment ?>

With a more elaborate PHP templating systems, such as Smarty, there are other syntaxes.

Answer 4

Hi fAB,

if you really want/have to use plain php for templating

    <?# this seems the best way to do comments ?>
    <?/* but
         block comments
         look ugly IMHO */?>

But I think there's a big conceptional difference between PHP and JSP - not in its real world usage scenarios, but what they were created/designed for.

While JSP was clearly built to be the "view" or "presentation" part of a java webapplication with as little controlling logic as possible, PHP started out as something like Perl but far more focused on web development.

Thus your usecase (re-usable MVC-framework) seems to call for one of the separate template-languages for PHP like Smarty or PHPTAL which are better suited to separate presentation from logic than plain PHP. This way, you're gonna use PHP for the model and controller-parts and the template-language like you'd use JSP (and yes, most templating engines support commenting the templates/template blocks far better than PHP).

Kind regards

Argelbargel