At 4/30/2007 03:38 PM, Philip Thompson wrote:
Ok, let's gather some stats to see how many people actually use the
heredoc syntax. I created this quick little form to gather the data.
It's takes 2 seconds (literally) - vote here:
http://thril.uark.edu/heredoc/
I'm interested in knowing if this is used a lot. If it is, then I may
consider tying it into my code (if it calls for it).
I recommend that you to make your decision about using heredoc based
on whether the syntax itself makes good sense to you, not based on
which number or percentage of other programmers use it.
I love using heredoc and I don't give a rat's ass if there are only
three other people in the world who use it. It absolutely makes
sense to me, helps me write better code with fewer errors and that's
much easier to read. I know from previous discussions of this topic
that it gives some people the freakin' heebee-jeebies. That's fine;
different strokes; doesn't matter. It's just one tool.
I use heredoc mostly for SQL queries, for html blocks, for inline
html assembly, and for other circumstances in which I'm merging
literals & variables. If a statement gets messy with too many
concatenations, I'll use heredoc. I use heredoc for much the same
reasons I like to separate data from logic in separate files. The
next best thing to importing text is to heredoc it in the script
itself. Also heredoc can be a quick & dirty way of roughing out a
script to get the logic right before exporting the text to a separate file.
Another commenter in this thread is correct: you can't get away with
referring to an array variable in heredoc without using {curly
braces} e.g. {$aArray['key']}. That and the fact that the
termination symbol has to be at the left margin are minor
disadvantages in my view, far outweighed by the difficulty in
accurately writing and reading complex concatenations.
When I first started using PHP I thought that each heredoc label had
to be unique. Turns out that's not true, and now I use the simple shorthand:
$sResult = <<<_
Some text.
_;
Regards,
Paul
__________________________
Paul Novitski
Juniper Webcraft Ltd.
http://juniperwebcraft.com
--
PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
