I want to conditionally output HTML to generate a page, so what's the easiest way to echo multiline snippets of HTML in PHP 4+? Would I need to use a template framework like Smarty?
echo '<html>', "\n"; // I'm sure there's a better way!
echo '<head>', "\n";
echo '</head>', "\n";
echo '<body>', "\n";
echo '</body>', "\n";
echo '</html>', "\n";
In addition to Chris B's answer, if you need to use echo anyway, still want to keep it simple and structured and don't want to spam the code with <?php stuff; ?>'s, you can use the syntax below.
For example you want to display the images of a gallery:
foreach($images as $image)
{
echo
'<li>',
'<a href="', site_url(), 'images/', $image['name'], '">',
'<img ',
'class="image" ',
'title="', $image['title'], '" ',
'src="', site_url(), 'images/thumbs/', $image['filename'], '" ',
'alt="', $image['description'], '"',
'>',
'</a>',
'</li>';
}
Echo takes multiple parameters so with good indenting it looks pretty good. Also using echo with parameters is more effective than concatenating.