So I was using create_function() in various ways, and I said to
myself, "this would look SO much better if I could use a heredoc that
acted like a single-quoted string". Then I said to myself, "Wait. I
know the PHP internals. Why don't I build a new syntax into the
language?" The result was a small modification of the heredoc syntax
that I call "nowdoc", and it looks like this:
<?php
$n = 1;
$a = <<<ENDOFHERE
I see $n.
ENDOFHERE;
$b = <<<~ENDOFNOW
I see $n.
ENDOFNOW;
print "{$a}\n{$b}\n";
?>
And the output is:
I see 1.
I see $n.
The b modifier is fully supported; a nowdoc acts exactly like a
single-quoted string, save that you can embed single quotes into it.
I wrote the patch for HEAD, backported it to PHP_5_2 (both fully up-
to-date as of this message), and wrote a set of regression tests. The
patch breaks none of the existing regression tests, and has no BC or
SC breaks whatsoever, as far as I can tell. The patch can be found at
http://phpdoc.gwynne.dyndns.org/nowdocs.tar.gz. I hope to see it
included in PHP 6 and 5.3, maybe even 5.2.4 or 5.2.5 since existing
scripts will continue to work without modification. <<<~ was a parse
error before, so anyone who used it was doing something wrong anyway.
Side note: I implemented nowdocs in the parser by sharing the heredoc
code and passing $ and {$ through unmodified instead of replaced. I
don't understand the way the HEREDOC_CHARS regexps work well enough
to write a simpler matching rule for the newdocs, but it's clear that
the patch could be optimized if only I knew how, since the entire
content can be parsed by a single call to zend_scan_[unicode|binary_]
escape_string() rather than having to be parsed for replacements. I
may look into this later, but for the moment I wanted to get what's
working out there in the commmunity.
-- Gwynne, Daughter of the Code
"This whole world is an asylum for the incurable."