As I said before, the function display_page can then be made more complicated by adding more parameters, e.g. telling it how to display the menu.

My point is that this is simpler — easier to write and debug — than using the in-built template functions combined with regex, and so I don’t see the advantage of using the latter approach. I don’t fear regular expressions for genuine string manipulation but they seem a messy solution for this type of thing…?

Another thing that I forgot: very often you need to inject values or do other changes to the header and footer. I do not see how we can do this with the example you presented above. Can you show another example highlighting how to modify the header and the footer ?

I must say that I don’t think your example is very clear. What is $content? What does display_page.php do?

Do you build up the output as string instead of echo’ing it and than put it into a function? If so, I really don’t like that approach, because you loose the whole templating feature of PHP.

You can use PHP the template when use the output buffer and than simply include the template PHP file, because echo’ing stuff won’t work and even ob_start, ob_get_contents won’t work correctly. That’s why I use regulair expressions. And I can just say: Don’t fear regexs, but learn to love them.

display_page.php (incorporating the template html):

etc.
etc.


then index.php:

etc. etc.
HTML;
< ?
display_page($content);
?>


This way it’s also very easy to add extra parameters to the display_page function, for instance telling it how menus should appear. No messing round with regular expressions. I think I’ll be sticking with this way for the time being!

-d

For instance:

In your index file you might want to independently control part of the header, the menu, and of course the content so your template file would need three separate calls and then your callback would need to be able to sort out those calls in your index file. Does that make sense?

How would handle this functionality?

Thanks, David