Smarty

[stef70]

I am new to smarty and there is one detail that I really dislike: the {literal} mecanism does not allow smarty tags inside it.
ock
There are several solutions to that problem (close & reopen the literal block or escape each { and }) but they all make the source unreadable.

I came up with a good idea: instead of trying to escape the { } from the document, escape the { } used by smarty.

This escaping could be limited to the inside of the {literal} block and only when requested.

For example, suppose that you have defined a tag {copyright lang="xxx"} that includes a copyright inside a comment of the specified language xxx.

You could write a piece of C++ code as follow:

{literal escape="@"}
#include <iosteam>

@{copyright lang="c++" @}

class Foo {
...
}
{/literal}

The advantage of specifiying the escape in the {literal} is that you can choose any character that is not common in the content. Also, the backward compatibility is insured since the default behavior is unchanged.

I do not know how {literal} is implemented but that feature should not be to difficult to do. Something like that probably:

(1) detect the end {/literal} marking the end of the block.
(2) if $escape is empty then stop here.
(3) for each '{' or '}' found in the block
if it is prefixed by $escape then discard that $escape
else replace the '{' and '}' by {ldelim} and {rdelim}
(4) process the resulting block with Smarty.