Templates stored in database

[Ben Allen]

Hi,
I have a form where a user can enter different feild, for simplicities sake,
say a 'To:', 'From' and 'Message' feild. The can select a 'template' from
the databse, each one has different layouts, images etc, and is sotred as
HTML code in the mySql. My question is how do I insert the vairables into
the correct places in the template? I realise if it was hard-coded I could
use something like:

echo "To:". $to. "<br><br>". $message. "<br><br>From:" . $from;

etc, although this is simplified alot and the ones int databse contain
images, tables, css etc. I don't really want to hardcode them using IF
statements as I want it to be easy to add new 'templates'.


Thanks
Ben

[Rik]

Re: Templates stored in database

Ben Allen wrote:[color=blue]
> Hi,
> I have a form where a user can enter different feild, for
> simplicities sake, say a 'To:', 'From' and 'Message' feild. The can
> select a 'template' from the databse, each one has different layouts,
> images etc, and is sotred as HTML code in the mySql. My question is
> how do I insert the vairables into the correct places in the
> template? I realise if it was hard-coded I could use something like:
>
> echo "To:". $to. "<br><br>". $message. "<br><br>From:" . $from;
>
> etc, although this is simplified alot and the ones int databse contain
> images, tables, css etc. I don't really want to hardcode them using IF
> statements as I want it to be easy to add new 'templates'.[/color]

If you have a limited amount of variables, you could look into the
(s)printf() function.
printf('To:%1$s <br><br>%2$s<br ><br>From:%3$s' , $to, $message, $from);

Else, you could consider a kind of syntax of your own, like
'{{{var_name}}} '.
$to = 'Me';
$from = 'You';
$message = 'message in this case';
$string = 'To:{{{to}}}<br ><br>{{{message }}}<br><br>From :{{{from}}}';
echo preg_replace('/{{{([a-zA-Z0-9_\-]*)}}}/e','$$1',$strin g);

I don't really like the e-modifier in this case, maybe others have a better
solution for this. Don't come knocking with eval(), that's even worse :P

Grtz,
--
Rik Wasmus