Hadanite Marasek: paran: Basic

paran is not going to work without Basic. Basic is simple, small and absolutely central. When I started to work for another company, which had their library in place already, I made it a condition that I might at least use some components of Basic lest to loose the last vestiges of my sanity.

Basic is just a collection of static methods which I turned into a class because I did not want to have a single include("functions.php") around. The central method is Basic::xmltag(), which you can search within the library and will find a lot. It will turn a string (tag name) and an array (attributes) into an XML opening tag:


<?php

$img["src"] = "cats/cute/minky.jpg";

$img["border"] = 0;

echo Basic::xmltag("img", $img);

// echoes <img src="cats/cute/minky.jpg" border="0" />

?>

This definitely beats the usual mess of slashes and strings when people concatenate XML-Tags by hand is certainly more elegant when having conditions:


<?php

$input["type"] = "text";

$input["name"] = "surname";

$input["value"] = $name

if($disabled == TRUE) {

    $input["checked"] = "checked";

}

echo Basic::xmltag("input", $input);



// the above construct surely beats this one:



echo "<input type=\"text\" name=\"surname\" value=\"".$surname."\" ";

if($disabled == TRUE) {

    echo "disabled=\"disabled\"";

}

echo " />";

?>

The latter is horrid, not to mention that it calls for a security issue if $name is not properly sanitized using htmlentities(). xmltag will properly mask all values. Along that line come two handy relatives, Basic::xmltagEnclose and Basic::xmltagUnsafeEnclose:


<?php

$a["href"] = "http://www.hadanite-marasek.de/";

$a["class"] = "extlink";

// & gets masked to &amp;

echo Basic::xmlEnclose("a", $a, "Marasek's page & blog");



// to prevent double masking of htmlentities, use unsafe enclose. You then have to care about

// proper masking yourself.

echo Basic::xmlUnsafeEnclose("td", array(), Basic::xmlEnclose("a", $a, "Marasek's page"));

?>

I have been criticized for using such a simple concept as opposed to DOM or similar, more object oriented mechanisms. Well, first of all, I know how to handle DOM. However, it should be clear that a method which keeps a representation of the entire DOM tree in memory and where every element is an object is a little bit more complex and has more overhead. xmltag served me very well so far.

dump and var_dump

Take me as a fan of "echo debugging". Some people scoff at this, but I'll usually get a bug faster with a few echoes than firing up all this debugging stuff which is not very trivial when you want to debug on a remote server and so on. Basic::dump and Basic::var_dump just add <pre></pre> around calls of print_r and var_dump - wonder why the PHP guys didn't put that as an option.

construct

I never liked the way of dynamically constructing objects with new $object(), as it looked as primitive as $function(), which I had long before replaced by call_user_func_array, first alone and then within paran: Callback. construct builds objects, internally using Reflection.


<?php

$class = "Date";

$instance = new $class(2008, 1, 1);

// nicer, clearer:

$instance = Basic::construct($class, array(2008, 1, 1));

?>

The latter does not just feel "nicer", it also looks nicer, allows for dynamic parameters and is easier to identify (globally search for Basic::construct and you get all runtime instantiations in your project).

Kommentieren

Bitte beachten: Kommentare sind nicht sofort sichtbar, sondern werden erst nach einer kurzen Prüfung freigegeben, sofern keine rechtliche Beanstandung vorliegt.
Rechtlich bedenkliche Inhalte werden entweder entschärft oder nicht veröffentlicht.

Kategorien

paran: Basic

dump and var_dump

construct

Kommentieren