Best Practices: Helper functions in EE
Development and Programming
14 years ago
I’m a CI developer who just started my first EE project.
Problem:
- I have a string with spaces and mixed casing: “My String.”
- I want to replace the spaces with hyphens and transform the string to lowercase: “my-string.”
Question:
- What’s the preferred method for doing this in EE?
Options:
- In PHP, this would be fairly trivial:
<?= strtolower(str_replace(' ', '-', 'My String')) ?>- In CI, I would probably move the above code into a helper function:
// Helper
function to_slug($str = '')
{
return strtolower(str_replace(' ', '-', $str));
}
// View
<?= to_slug('My String') ?>- In EE, I know I could write a plugin to do the above, but isn’t that overkill? The result might be something like:
{exp:toslug}My String{/exp:toslug}- Or, what about an embed? Even that seems a bit much. Something like:
{embed="functions/to_slug" str="My String"}What do you think?
14 years ago
Turns out EE plugins are simpler to write than I thought:
class View_helper {
public $return_data = '';
// -------------------------------------------------------------------
public function __construct()
{
$this->EE =& get_instance();
$param = $this->EE->TMPL->fetch_param('helper');
$tagdata = $this->EE->TMPL->tagdata;
switch($param)
{
case 'to_slug':
$this->return_data = strtolower(str_replace(' ', '-', $tagdata));
break;
}
}
}{exp:view_helper helper='to_slug'}My String{/exp:view_helper}Still, I’m curious to hear your thoughts.