Re: Display Variable within a variable

Christopher, BINGO! (I've got to spend some time on regular expressions and replacement and evaluation functions.) Thanks very much - Miles Thompson At 11:27 AM 01/03/2001 -0600, you wrote:

If I understand you correctly (I probably don't), you're just looking for way to interpolate (fill in) a variable within a string that you get from your database (thus being a variable itself). If that's so, I always do a preg_replace( ... ) with the eval option '//e'. Example say you fetched this msg from your database and shoved it into a variable called $template, and it looks like this:

$template =     "Thank you for your bid. To be accepted it must increase the previous bid       by $yMinBidIncr. Please adjust the amount and send it again." $yMinBidIncr      is the amount by which this bid must exceed the previous bid.
  replace the $yMinBidIncr with '{yMinBidIncr}' (without the qoutes) in your database and

run this on it. $yMinBidIncr = 19.99; $template = preg_replace( '/\{([^}]*)\}/e', '$\\1', $template ); and now $template will contain:

        "Thank you for your bid. To be accepted it must increase the previous bid       by 19.99. Please adjust the amount and send it again." $yMinBidIncr     is the amount by which this bid must exceed the previous bid.
all that preg_replace does is search for things like {whatever} and replaces it with a $whatever and then evals it.

Hope this helps you out. _chris thepope@emphasys.net