I have a PHP function that I'm using to output a standard block of HTML. It currently looks like this:
<?php function TestBlockHTML ($replStr) { ?>
<html>
<body><h1> <?php echo ($replStr) ?> </h1>
</html>
<?php } ?>
I want to return (rather than echo) the HTML inside the function. Is there any way to do this without building up the HTML (above) in a string?
Yes, there is: you can capture the echoed text using ob_start:
<?php function TestBlockHTML ($replStr) { ob_start(); ?>
<html>
<body><h1> <?php echo ($replStr) ?> </h1>
</html>
<?php
return ob_get_clean();
} ?>
You can use a heredoc, which supports variable interpolation, making it look fairly neat:
function TestBlockHTML ($replStr) {
return <<<HTML
<html>
<body><h1>{$replStr}</h1>
</html>
HTML;
}
Pay close attention to the warning in the manual though - the closing line must not contain any whitespace, so can't be indented.
Make sure when using Paul's solution to have the closing line
HTML;
in a separate line with no leading spaces or tabs.
Create a template file and use a template engine to read/update the file. It will increase your code's maintainability in the future as well as separate display from logic.
An example using Smarty:
Template File
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head><title>{$title}</title></head>
<body>{$string}</body>
</html>
Code
function TestBlockHTML(){
$smarty = new Smarty();
$smarty->assign('title', 'My Title');
$smarty->assign('string', $replStr);
return $smarty->render('template.tpl');
}