Best Practices working with long multiline strings in PHP

Question

Note  I m sorry if this is an extremely simple question but I m somewhat obsessive compulsive over the formatting of my code   I have a class that has a function that returns a string that will make up the body text of an email  I want this text formatted so it looks right in the email  but also so it doesn t make my code look funky  Here s what I mean   class Something       public function getEmailText  vars                 text    Hello      vars- gt name       The second line starts two lines below   I also don t want any spaces before the new line  so it s butted up against the left side of the screen            return  text            but it could also be written as   public function getEmailText  vars         text    Hello   vars- gt name   n rThe second line starts two lines below  n rI also don t want any spaces before the new line  so it s butted up against the left side of the screen        return  text      but what s the deal with new lines and carriage returns  What s the difference  Is  n n the equivalent of  r r or  n r  Which should I use when I m creating a line gap between lines   Then there s the option of output buffering and heredoc syntax   How do you deal with using long multiline strings in your objects

User · Answer

Adding  n and or  r in the middle of the string  and having a very long line of code  like in second example  doesn t feel right   when you read the code  you don t see the result  and you have to scroll   In this kind of situations  I always use Heredoc  Or Nowdoc  if using PHP    5 3    easy to write  easy to read  no need for super-long lines       For instance     var    World    str    lt  lt  lt MARKER this is a very long string that doesn t require horizontal scrolling   and interpolates variables   Hello   var  MARKER    Just one thing   the end marker  and the     after it  must be the only thing on its line   no space tab before or after

User · Answer

You should use heredoc or nowdoc   var    quot some text quot    text    lt  lt  lt EOT   Place your text between the EOT  It s   the delimiter that ends the text   of your multiline string     var EOT   The difference between heredoc and nowdoc is that PHP code embedded in a heredoc gets executed  while PHP code in nowdoc will be printed out as is   var    quot foo quot    text    lt  lt  lt  EOT    My  var EOT   In this case  text will have the value  quot My  var quot   not  quot My foo quot   Notes   Before the closing EOT  there should be no spaces or tabs  otherwise you will get an error  The string tag  EOT  that enclose the text is arbitrary  that is  one can use other strings  e g   lt  lt  lt FOO and FOO  EOT   End of transmission  EOD  End of data   Q

User · Answer

but what s the deal with new lines and carriage returns  What s the difference  Is  n n the equivalent of  r r or  n r  Which should I use when I m creating a line gap between lines    No one here seemed to actualy answer this question  so here I am    r represents  carriage-return    n represents  line-feed   The actual reason for them goes back to typewriters  As you typed the  carriage  would slowly slide  character by character  to the right of the typewriter  When you got to the end of the line you would return the carriage and then go to a new line  To go to the new line  you would flip a lever which fed the lines to the type writer  Thus these actions  combined  were called carriage return line feed  So quite literally   A line feed  n  means moving to the next line   A carriage return   r  means moving the cursor to the beginning of the line   Ultimately Hello n nWorld should result in the following output on the screen   Hello       World   Where as Hello r rWorld should result in the following output   It s only when combining the 2 characters  r n that you have the common understanding of knew line  I E  Hello r nWorld should result in   Hello World   And of course  n r would result in the same visual output as  r n   Originally computers took  r and  n quite literally  However these days the support for carriage return is sparse  Usually on every system you can get away with using  n on its own  It never depends on the OS  but it does depend on what you re viewing the output in   Still I d always advise using  r n wherever you can

User · Answer

In regards to your question about newlines and carriage returns   I would recommend using the predefined global constant PHP EOL as it will solve any cross-platform compatibility issues   This question has been raised on SO beforehand and you can find out more information by reading  When do I use the PHP constant PHP EOL

User · Answer

Sure  you could use HEREDOC  but as far as code readability goes it s not really any better than the first example  wrapping the string across multiple lines   If you really want your multi-line string to look good and flow well with your code  I d recommend concatenating strings together as such    text    Hello    vars- gt name   r n r n         The second line starts two lines below  r n            Third line    etc     This might be slightly slower than HEREDOC or a multi-line string  but it will flow well with your code s indentation and make it easier to read

User · Answer

I like this method a little more for Javascript but it seems worth including here because it has not been mentioned yet    var    pizza     text   implode           I love me some      really large      var     pies             I love me some really large pizza pies     For smaller things  I find it is often easier to work with array structures compared to concatenated strings   Related  implode vs concat performance

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I use templates for long text   email-template txt contains  hello  name   how are you     In PHP I do this    email   file get contents  email-template txt     email   str replace   name      Simon    email

User · Answer

you can also use     lt  php ob start    echo  some text   echo   n       you can also use     gt   some text can be also written here  or maybe HTML   lt div gt whatever lt  div gt   lt  php echo  you can basically write whatever you want      and then    long text   ob get clean

User · Answer

I use similar system as pix0r and I think that makes the code quite readable  Sometimes I would actually go as far as separating the line breaks in double quotes and use single quotes for the rest of the string  That way they stand out from the rest of the text and variables also stand out better if you use concatenation rather than inject them inside double quoted string  So I might do something like this with your original example    text    Hello      vars- gt name                 r n r n           The second line starts two lines below             r n r n           I also don  t want any spaces before the new line             so it  s butted up against the left side of the screen     return  text    Regarding the line breaks  with email you should always use  r n  PHP EOL is for files that are meant to be used in the same operating system that php is running on

User · Answer

The one who believes that   abc n     def n    is multiline string is wrong  That s two strings with concatenation operator  not a multiline string  Such concatenated strings cannot be used as keys of pre-defined arrays  for example  Unfortunately php does not offer real multiline strings in form of   abc n   def n    only HEREDOC and NOWDOC syntax  which is more suitable for templates  because nested code indent is broken by such syntax

[php] Best Practices: working with long, multiline strings in PHP?

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