Navarr's Tech Side The Technical Side of my Life

Magical Typesetting in PHP

So, well working for Route 50 I came up with a fantastic idea for “typesetting” that well exceeded the norm.  Something we constantly have issues with is what type of string was sent to MySQL originally (some of us have different conventional ideas about where escaping HTML should be located.) as well as outputting that string in its correct format.

Me, with my fantastic idea, came up with a couple variables classes that I put in a file named class_typesetting.php.  The version on gist.github is slightly modified from the original version on the server.

It creates three classes, GenericVariable, String, and Number.  So far we haven’t used GenericVariable, but since the introduction of the classes I’ve taken it upon myself to introduce them to any new code I write.  When we create Core v5 (which will Objectify everything) strings taken from SQL will automatically be re-stored as String class variables.

First, lets examine some useful functionality.

Code block
   
<?php
$title = new String($_POST[“title”]); // <strong>Hello 'World'</strong>
?>
HTML Output: <?= $title->html ?> (&lt;strong&gt;Hello 'World'&lt;/strong&gt;)
Text Output: <?= $title->text ?> (Hello 'World')
SQL Output: <?= $title->sql ?> (<strong>Hello \'World\'</strong>)
HTML Attribute Output: <?= $title->html_attr ?>(&lt;strong&gt;Hello &#039;World&#039;&lt;/strong&gt;)

This allows for quick and easy access to the variables without having to worry about escaping them.

I recommend you hit the download link (class_typesetting.php) and play around with it.  Tell me about anything that’s not working correctly and if possible implement it in your future code.  (This means I’m putting this code in the “Public Domain”).