Comments on: Symfony Templates and Ruby’s ERb

By: Sinon

Sinon — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:45:59 +0000

mate, good points.. very interesting.

By: anirudh

anirudh — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:27:41 +0000

i wan to know the clear syntax of erb tags

By: troelskn

troelskn — Tue, 09 May 2006 13:20:28 +0000

Templates should never be doing operations that need to be silenced anyway.

I don’t fully agree with that. I always run with full error-reporting, which can lead to some unwieldy syntax, if you aren’t sure if a variable is set. Using @ in front of the variable, makes it equal null. I use that quite often in templates.
Maybe the I’m the one who’s doing it wrong though - could be I should just lower the error-level inside templates, to ignore warnings. Are you guys doing that ?

By: Mike Naberezny

Mike Naberezny — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 05:55:21 +0000

That’s one way to think about it. You could also build a plugin mechanism for template helpers to do things like escaping, as Paul has done in Savant. Also, the example template class is very crude in that it does nothing to sanitize data going into it. Another way to approach this problem would be to use __set() to filter all data put into the template with a default filtration strategy, and then have a separate assign() method to allow for filtering by different strategies.

By: matt

matt — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 05:08:48 +0000

What about replacing all echos and prints:

echo @$XXX

becomes:

echo htmlentities(XXX, ENT_QUOTES)

Maybe change the @ to ! for printing raw data:

!$body_text

Hmm… Actually, just replace “echo” with “echo htmlentities(XXX, ENT_QUOTES)” and create a new function for printing raw:

echor @$product_details

???

-m

By: Mike Naberezny

Mike Naberezny — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 04:59:44 +0000

It’s unwise and generally regarded as a beginner’s mistake to rely on short_open_tag because it is one of the most frequently disabled php.ini settings, especially on shared hosts. short_open_tag is enabled in php.ini-dist but disabled in php.ini-recommended.

By: Rod

Rod — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 04:48:34 +0000

[If] short_open_tag is disabled, the resulting PHP syntax can be a bit unwieldy:

var_name ?>

Compare this to the succinct but equally powerful ERb:

But when exactly is short_open_tag not enabled? it is by default, and therefore you can use:

which is just as concise.

By: Jake Grimley

Jake Grimley — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 15:23:24 +0000

Yeah point taken. If I could have made a better suggestion guess I would have in my original post.

I suppose it’s a matter of context too, I mean in the short-tag style using = in the context of has a different meaning to using it as the assignment operator and AFAIK this symbol was chosen purely because it already had that meaning in ASP and JSP. So perhaps using @ within short tags in the interests of associating with ERB is OK.

See — I’ve talked myself round… Now if somebody could just find some way to allow us to pass arrays to methods without using the clumsy array() syntax perhaps I’ll stop coveting RoR!

By: Paul M. Jones

Paul M. Jones — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 13:57:18 +0000

Oh, and Mike — really neat idea man. :-)

By: Paul M. Jones

Paul M. Jones — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 13:56:10 +0000

Hi Jake — I don’t think there are many unused symbols. Here are the non-word characters on my keyboard:

~ ` ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) - = + { } [ ] \ | : ” ; ‘ , . / ?

I think they *all* have some special meaning to PHP. The question then is to pick the “least-worst” symbol, because there’s isn’t a “good” one. I think the @ sign, of them, is a good choice.