Working with Smarty and PHP variables

Question

Here is the scenario.

I have text in the DB that looks like this:

blah blah blah blah blah {$name} {$index}

As you may see it contains two Smarty variables {$name} and {$index}

Now I need to assign the values to the variables with Smarty. For those who do not know Smarty, values can be easily assigned this way:

$smarty->assign('name_of_the_variable', $variable);

The problem is that this text is coming from the DB, and I do not know which variables will be in the text, so I am trying to abstract the code doing the following:

    function getPageContent($page) {

        $smarty = new Smarty(); // initializing Smarty

    //selecting the content and saving it into the $content variable
        $q='SELECT * FROM pages_blocks WHERE Page="'.$page.'"';
         $r=mysql_query($q) or die(mysql_error());
             while($row = mysql_fetch_array($r)) {
              $content = $row['Content'];
               }

//defining variables
        $name = "NAME";
        $index = "INDEX";

    //getting all the variables inside brackets {}
               preg_match_all('/{(.+)}/U', $content, $matches);


    //abstracting the code assigning values to the variables found   
        foreach ($matches[1] as $match) {
         $foo = str_replace('$', '', $match); //removing the $ to give a name to smarty
          $smarty->assign(''.$foo.'', $match); //final assignation of name and its variable
         }
           $smarty->display('string:'.$content); //displaying the final content
        }

The problem is that the final content looks like:

blah blah blah blah blah $name $index

Instead of

blah blah blah blah blah NAME INDEX

Something is wrong. Smarty is printing the variables as they are instead of running them before as normal.

Please help me.

Good advise. But it's not helping me at all at the moment. I am using Smarty and I need a solution using it... — DiegoP.
– DiegoP., Commented Jan 31, 2012 at 0:56

Ben Lee · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-31 00:59:41Z

3

Replace this:

$smarty->assign(''.$foo.'', $match);

With this:

$smarty->assign(''.$foo.'', ${$foo});

answered Jan 31, 2012 at 0:59

Ben Lee

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5 Comments

DiegoP. Over a year ago

Why? What was the problem? I am curious

Ben Lee Over a year ago

eval isn't the right way to load a variable based off another variable name. ${...} is the way, where "..." is like a string with interpolation, so you can put other variables in there.

Ben Lee Over a year ago

For example, consider the code: $a = '1'; $b = 'a'; echo ${$b}; Will echo "1".

DiegoP. Over a year ago

ok but it's not working with arrays, variables like $lang['city'] does not work..can you help me?

Ben Lee Over a year ago

For something like that, you'll have to divide the string into components, lang and city (use a regexp or however you want to do it). So say you have them separated into variables called $key (== 'lang') and $ind (== 'city'). Then you can do ${$key}[$ind].

Vyktor · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-31 00:57:39Z

0

You're using regexp {(.+)}, .+ will "eat" everything it sees, so it'll match: $name} {$index.

You should use greedy killer: ''/\\{(.+?)\\}/U''

answered Jan 31, 2012 at 0:57

Vyktor

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1 Comment

Vyktor Over a year ago

@yes123 any particular reason? I found it as good practice mostly in combination with characters and numbers for case that they get special meaning in future, such as \d may be interpreted as DEL character or so.

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