PHP/HTML Indentation

JonD · 3 Jun 2006 at 22:29

If you have a function which echos html such as

PHP:

function bob()
{
    echo '<b>woo</b>';
}

When you look at the HTML source of this result, it is indentated with however many tabs before the echo, making the HTML very untidy.

Is there any settings on apache to stop this? I like nice and tidy html.

Thx

robmiller · 3 Jun 2006 at 22:54

Tabs in your PHP source do not appear in the final markup unless you explicitly echo them.

See:

PHP:

<?php
								echo 'LOL';
echo "\n";
echo '							LOL';
?>

Produces:

Code:

LOL
							LOL

JonD · 3 Jun 2006 at 23:40

they are appearing. This function:

Here is a slice:

PHP:

class Framework 
{	
	function printSite()
	{	
		echo '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
		<html>
		<head>
		<title>'.$this->settings['websitetitle'].'</title>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
		<meta name="keywords" content="'.$this->settings['keywords'].'" />
		<meta name="description" content="'.$this->settings['description'].'" />
		<meta name="author" content="Jonathan Dawber" />
		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style/style.css" />
		</head>
		</html>';		
	}	
}

The actual code is tabbed twice on each line, but I want to keep these tabs to keep the php file tidy but it indents all of the code.

I dont wanna write echo on each line or outdent the code.

See waht i mean?
Anyway around?

robc123 · 4 Jun 2006 at 00:07

Should you really be writing code like that, hardly efficient is it.

Beansprout · 4 Jun 2006 at 00:08

Aha, so it *is* doing waht robmiller said, becase you have tabs within the echo string there

You could run it through a str_replace() and strip out all the \t characters I suppose.

robmiller · 4 Jun 2006 at 01:11

Or you could just not care about how your code looks, but rather how it's structured and how it renders :confused:

Beansprout · 4 Jun 2006 at 02:41

When I'm bored I spend far too much time optimising than making it actually work properly

Dj_Jestar · 4 Jun 2006 at 03:33

Code:

<?php
class Framework 
{    
    function printSite()
    {    
        echo "<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN\" \"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd\">\n"
        . "<html>\n"
        . "<head>\n"
        . "<title>{$this->settings['websitetitle']}</title>\n"
        . "<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\" />\n"
        . "<meta name=\"keywords\" content=\"{$this->settings['keywords']}\" />\n"
        . "<meta name=\"description\" content=\"{$this->settings['description']}\" />\n"
        . "<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jonathan Dawber\" />\n"
        . "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"style/style.css\" />\n"
        . "</head>\n"
        . "</html>";
    }    
}  
?>

is one way to do it 'neatly'

arty · 4 Jun 2006 at 10:06

You could write everything to a buffer, then chuck it through a quick HTML-tidying function at the end if it's important to you. That's what I do when speed isn't so much of an issue (though we're only talking ~2ms on the largest pages I've tried)...

arty

robc123 · 4 Jun 2006 at 10:19

What exactly are you building this for anyway? It seems shocking to me that you would hard code html into a php class which means that the server has to do more work.

Gman · 4 Jun 2006 at 12:12

if you use that code above how exactly would you place the body tags inbetween the html tags ??

Beansprout · 4 Jun 2006 at 12:24

Gman said:
if you use that code above how exactly would you place the body tags inbetween the html tags ??

You know I never even noticed that

JonD · 4 Jun 2006 at 23:30

As I said, the code I posted was an example!!!

The body tags are missing because its a "slice", read again

I just wanted to know if there was anyway to get rid of the tabs automatically or someway, looks like there isnt. Thx anyway