PHP-HTML Templates: A New Working Relationship Page 5

All the work will then be performed by the PHP function : template_parser.
The detailed workings of template_parser function is as follows :

function template_parser

function template_parser ($template_filename, $replacement_rules, $recordset_array)
{
   $START_FLAG = 0;
   $start_anchor=0;
   $end_anchor=0;
   $res_arr="";
   $fcontents = file (TEMPLATES_PATH . $template_filename);
   while (list ($line_num, $line) = each ($fcontents))
   {
      if ($START_FLAG == 0)
      {
         if (ereg ('<!--START_ROW-->', $line))
         {
            $START_FLAG = 1;
            $start_anchor = $line_num;
         }
      }
      else
      {
         if (!ereg ('<!--END_ROW-->', $line))
         {
            $res_arr .= $line;
         }
         else
         {
            $START_FLAG = 0;
            $end_anchor = $line_num;
         }
      }
   }

   /* Build String-Replacement Rules ... */
   $tmp_res_arr = "";
   $n = count($data_array);

   for ($x=0; $x<$n; $x++)
   {
      $tmp = $res_arr;
      for ($y=0; $y<count($replacement_rules); $y++)
      {
         $a = $replacement_rules[$y][0];
         $b = $replacement_rules[$y][1];

         if (ereg ("<!", $a))
         {
            $data_array[$x][$b] = stripslashes ($data_array[$x][$b]);
            eval ("$tmp = str_replace ("$a", $data_array[$x][$b], $tmp);");
            $tmp = stripslashes($tmp);
         }
      }
      $tmp_res_arr .= $tmp;
   }
   $res_arr = $tmp_res_arr;

   /* Re-constructing the file-contents ... */
   $n = count($fcontents);
   for ($x=0; $x<$n; $x++)
   {
      $y = $start_anchor + ($x - $end_anchor) ;

      if (($x >= $start_anchor) and ($x < $end_anchor))
      {
         if ($n_fcontents[$start_anchor] == "")
            $n_fcontents[$x] =  $res_arr;
      }
      elseif ($x > $end_anchor)
         $n_fcontents[$y] = $fcontents[$x];
      else
         $n_fcontents[$x] = $fcontents[$x];
   }

   return ($n_fcontents);
}   // end function template_parser

What the above does is to “reproduce” the HTML codes surrounded by both HTML-comment tags :
<!--START_ROW--> and <!--END_ROW--> as many times as the number of rows found in the $recordset_array array, yet with the intelligence to replace data fields (columns of $recordset_array array) in places
defined in the $replacement_rules array without affecting the original HTML formattings.

When all the necessary replacements have been done, the entire HTML page will be “echoed” out by PHP.