On Mon, 2012-12-31 at 13:39 -0600, Nelson Green wrote: > Hello, > > I have created a simple function that prints a personalized greeting by reading > the greeting contents from a file. I pass the user's name to the function, > and the function reads the file contents into a string variable. I am then > using str_replace to replace the word USER in the string with the user's > name that was passed to the function. Then the function correctly prints > the personalized greeting as I wish. > > My question is, is there another way to do something similar, such as > embedding a variable name directly into the text file? In other words, > instead of my text file reading: > > Hello USER ... > > Can I do something like this: > > Hello $user_name ... > > and then write my function to replace $user_name with the passed > parameter prior to printing? > > The reason I ask is because I am going to want to do three substitutions, > and I'd rather not do three str_replace calls if I don't have to. Plus the > latter seems to be a more robust way of making the changes. > > Thanks, and apologies if this has been asked before and I missed it. I'm > just not sure how to phrase this for a search engine. > > Nelson You could use an existing templating solution, like Smarty, although for what you want to do it might be overkill. A few str_replace() calls shouldn't produce too much overhead, but it depends on the size of the text string in question. If it's just a couple of paragraphs of text, no problem, something closer to a whole chapter of a book will obviously be more expensive. You could try eval() on the block of text, but if you do, be really careful about what text you're using. I wouldn't recommend this if you're using any text supplied by a user. As a last option, you could have the text stored as separate parts which you join together in one string later. This might be less expensive in terms of processing power required, but it also makes maintenance more of a hassle later. Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
