An illustration of using str_replace to replace placeholders would be:
$paramNames = array("{title}", "{category}", "{author}");
$paramValues = array("The Great Gatsby", "Fiction", "F. Scott Fitzgerald");
$text = "{title} by {author}, a {category} novel.";
str_replace($paramNames, $paramValues, $text);
The arrays $paramNames and $paramValues must have the same number of elements.
A more specialized function for this could be:
/* Substitutes template placeholders with corresponding values. Another version could accept a file name with the template text. */
/* Parameters: */
/* template - the template text */
/* params - an associative array of placeholder name=>value pairs */
function process_template($template, $params) {
$result = $template;
foreach ($params as $name => $value) {
// echo "Replacing {$name} with '$value'"; // echo can be used for debugging
$result = str_replace("{$name}", $value, $result);
}
return $result;
}
Example of usage:
$text = process_template("{title} by {author}, a {category} novel.", array(
"title" => "To Kill a Mockingbird", "category" => "Classic", "author" => "Harper Lee"
));
Here's an instance of an object-oriented method:
class TextTemplate {
private static $left = "{";
private static $right = "}";
private $template;
function __construct($template) {
$this->template = $template;
}
public function apply($params) {
$placeholders = array();
$values = array();
foreach($params as $name => $value) {
array_push($placeholders, self::$left . $name . self::$right);
array_push($values, $value);
}
$result = str_replace($placeholders, $values, $this->template);
return $result;
}
}
Usage example:
$template = new TextTemplate("{title} by {author}, a {category} novel.");
$text = $template->apply(array("title" => "1984", "category" => "Dystopian", "author" => "George Orwell"));