EDIT: After typing this out I think this approach is a non starter. All I am trying to do is to find an easier way to type <?= and ?> in longish HTML pages. Any ideas greatly appreciated.
LATER: Yep this is a non-starter so I am tweaking my IDE (the wonderful PhpStorm) to take care of this and will probably start using Twig "soon".
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I find endless typing of <?= => an absolute nightmare. For some reason I really cannot remember position of the keys on keyboard and get confused on the shift/nonshift (brain aged 64 and/or too much cannabliss in my youth?) and have to search for them every time and do things like just now I typed a + instead of a =!
I don't want to use a full-on templating engine like Moustache yet but just want to replace the <?= and => with something like {{{ }}}.
To experiment I am using jjjj and kkk.
To try and do this I put the whole HTML page into a HEREDOC variable called $mypage. At present there is only one replacement target but this will obviously go into a loop if I can get it working.
$start = strpos($myPage, "jjjj");
$end = strpos($myPage, "kkk");
substr_replace($myPage,"<?=$",$start,4);
substr_replace($myPage,"?> ",$end, 3);
$insName = "Boo";
echo $myPage;
In the HTML I have:
<label for="clientFirstName">First name* jjjjinsNamekkk</label>
The echo works fine and displays the page properly but the strings are not replaced. Worse than that I think I may be just completely wrong.
If I replace the jjjj in the body with <?=$ will that be interpreted or just echoed as text to the screen?
Also given that I tend to use includes quite a lot would they work in this echo/HEREDOC strategy? I suspect not.
Grateful for any suggestions.
PS Yes I know this is all a terrible way of doing things but this is for an alpha for LITERALLY about 10 people so I am just doing a quick and dirty. (Which to be honest is the only way I program these days!)
Your (edited) question is the sort of thing your IDE or enhanced editor would usually do for you. From what I can glean, it appears you use PHPStorm. You could use a Live Template for this. There are some pre-defined ones for PHP but I don't think what you're after is there.
For example, to create one to insert the whole of <?= ?>
<?=$END$ ?> into the editor ($END$ positions the cursor)Thereafter you can type 'pie' followed by the tab key into the editor to insert the text.