Is there any way for all my PHP and/or HTML file output to be "filtered" before being displayed in the browser? I figured that I could pass it through a global function before it is displayed but I'm stuck on the implementation. Please help.
If there is a better way to achieve the same result, I'd be happy to know.
Thanks.
Check out ob_start which lets you pass a callback handler for post-processing your script output.
For example, PHP includes a built-in callback ob_gzhandler for use in compressing the output:
<?php
ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
?>
<html>
<body>
<p>This should be a compressed page.</p>
</html>
<body>
Here's a fuller example illustrating how you might tidy your HTML with the tidy extension:
function tidyhtml($input)
{
$config = array(
'indent' => true,
'output-xhtml' => true,
'wrap' => 200);
$tidy = new tidy;
$tidy->parseString($input, $config, 'utf8');
$tidy->cleanRepair();
// Output
return $tidy;
}
ob_start("tidyhtml");
//now output your ugly HTML
If you wanted to ensure all your PHP scripts used the same filter without including it directly, check out the auto_prepend_file configuration directive.
You can use output buffering and specify a callback when you call ob_start()
<?php
function filterOutput($str) {
return strtoupper($str);
}
ob_start('filterOutput');
?>
<html>
some stuff
<?php echo 'hello'; ?>
</html>
You can use PHP's output buffering functions to do that
You can provide a callback method that is called when the buffer is flushed, like:
<?php
function callback($buffer) {
// replace all the apples with oranges
return (str_replace("apples", "oranges", $buffer));
}
ob_start("callback");
?>
<html>
<body>
<p>It's like comparing apples to oranges.</p>
</body>
</html>
<?php
ob_end_flush();
?>
In that case output is buffered instead of sent from the script and just before the flush your callback method is called.
Have a look at using Smarty. It's a templating system for PHP, that is good practice to use, and into which you can plug global output filters.
edit: Paul's reply is better. So it would be
ob_start("my_filter_function");
My original reply was:
That can be achieved with output buffering.
For example:
ob_start();
// Generate all output
echo "all my output comes here."
// Done, filtering now
$contents = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
echo my_filter_function($contents);
