Formats/Templates

Greetings, My apologies for not lurking longer before posting, and for the length of the post. I am interested in something similar to perl 'formats' for php. I think these would be especially powerful when applied to generating rows in html tables. For those of you not familiar with perl's formats, they work like this: (my apologies for alignment problems) # a report on the /etc/passwd file format STDOUT_TOP = Passwd File Name Login Office Uid Gid Home ------------------------------------------------------------------ . format STDOUT = @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< @||||||| @<<<<<<@>>>> @>>>> @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< $name, $login, $office,$uid,$gid, $home . (stolen from the perlform(1p) man page) And they're usually used within a while() loop, like: while ( $result = run_query() ) { $name = $result->name; $login = $result->login; ... write; } Which would print the format with the first '@<<<<<<<' interpolated as a left justified $name, etc. It's also (one of the keys here) possible to run a function/subroutine call to return one of the variables. So we could have a &disk_space_used($name) as the last variable. I think it would be very powerful to write a 'format' in php in (almost) plain html that would automatically assign variables from a SQL query and iterate over the resulting records. I'm not sure of syntax here, but something like this: <?php query_format USERS_TOP = <table> <tr><th>Name</th><th>Age</th></tr> . query_format USERS = <tr><td>%name</td><td>get_age_from_birtday(%birthdate)</td></tr> . query_format USERS_BOT = </table> . $result = run_sql_query("SELECT name, birthdate FROM users"); write_formatted_query("USERS", $result, $number_of_records_per_table"); ?> I'm sure I'm missing quite a lot here, but I think this is part of what makes perl such a good reporting language, and I think it's fits into html better than most places. Isn't easy yet powerful creation of html tables from query results enough of a generic need that it merits examination of a special case feature aimed at it? I may very well try to implement this myself, as an addition to the php core language or (possibly?) an add-on, but I'd love to hear about your feelings on the idea. I'm especially interested in knowing if someone else has already done this in some other form. Thanks for your time, -Stefan Stefan Wasilewski Triton Network Systems, Inc. smw@triton-network.com -- PHP Development Mailing List http://www.php.net/ To unsubscribe send an empty message to php-dev-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For help: php-dev-help@lists.php.net