How to parse smarty tags from a plugin?

donshakespeare

Any way to do something like this?

$myValue = 'Hello this is the id {$BodyID}, and some other cool stuff custom {$myPlugin.cssUrl}'
$myValue = $this->myPluginHookSmartyParser($myValue);

Many imaginative thoughtful wonders to come depend on this ...

Thanks in advance

R_J

Smarty is for views. If you put a smarty template in the views folder and call sender->render('viewnamewithoutextension', '', '/plugins/yourplugin'), that smarty view gets rendered

donshakespeare

Ah! There must be a way to parse raw text at hand (which source is from anywhere)

R_J

Well, I bet you can but that is not efficient. Smarty is made to deal with blocks, sub-templates, can handle logic, etc. But if you really want to go that way, here is what I found out.

Vanilla exposes Smarty in its Gdn_Smarty class. It creates an instance of Smarty like that:

   $smarty = new SmartyBC();

   $smarty->setCacheDir(PATH_CACHE.'/Smarty/cache');
   $smarty->setCompileDir(PATH_CACHE.'/Smarty/compile');
   $smarty->addPluginsDir(PATH_LIBRARY.'/SmartyPlugins');
   Gdn::pluginManager()->callEventHandlers($smarty, 'Gdn_Smarty', 'Init');

If you look at /vendor/smarty/smarty/demo/index.php you see that you have to "assign" data so that it can be used in the template: $smarty->assign("option_selected", "NE");

Now you have to find a way/method that doesn't take a template name but a string.

I'm not sure that this is really possible. One of Smartys advantages is that it compiles templates and only recompiles them if the source changes. Therefore I assume it would always expect a template file. You might be able to create a template object manually but this is getting quite complicated.

Smarty can do a lot more than only replacing some strings. The first thing that comes to my mind is "Why not simply use sprintf?" The second thing is "I think I have seen something similar being used in Vanilla". And that second thought has brought me to the HeadlineFormat of the Activities:

$Activity['HeadlineFormat'] = t('HeadlineFormat.Mention', '{ActivityUserID,user} mentioned you in <a href="{Url,html}">{Data.Name,text}</a>');

That looks quite similar to Smarty...

Look at functions.general.php formatString() to see that there is something included which is far more easy than Smarty but might fulfil the purpose.

donshakespeare

Thanks.

The HeadlineFormat seems to be a mere predefined mapping of variables. Which might actually work in my case, if I was not so ambitious as to want to allow all possible vanilla smarty tags in this blob to be parsed.

As I dig further about the Gdn_Smartyclass, I wonder if I should even invest in smarty codes at all and not switch altogether to Twig. I hear that vanilla core shall be moving that direction, as it already supports it.

R_J

I also think Twig will be the future. But I do not think Smarty will get ditched soon.

You've said:

if I was not so ambitious as to want to allow all possible vanilla smarty tags

and that you wanted to convert strings like "Hello this is the id {$BodyID}, and some other cool stuff custom {$myPlugin.cssUrl}"

There are no such things as "Vanilla Smarty tags". Look at the init() method of class.smarty.php. There you will find $smarty->assign() calls which define those placeholders.

A small and lean search and replace function like formatString together with the data assigned in the Gdn_Smarty->init() will be a much more efficient approach. Using a template engine for one string only is a waste of resources.