PHP Shorthand is used in SimpleTemplate and XT templates in various tags to simplify the PHP syntax used. In XT this was originally intended to avoid PHP's XML-invalid characters, but it also has the benefit of increasing the readability of template tags by keeping them as alphanumeric as possible.

Keyword Substitutions

Case-insensitive keywords are replaced by their respective operators. These include:

• AND Becomes "&&"
• EQ Becomes "=="
• EQQ Becomes "==="
• GE Becomes ">="
• GT Becomes ">"
• LE Becomes "<="
• LT Becomes "<"
• MOD Becomes "%"
• NE Becomes "!="
• NEQ Becomes "!=="
• NOT Becomes "!"
• OR Becomes "||"

Additional Transformations

• HTML entities for "<" and ">" are converted to their proper symbols.
• "." is converted to "->" and to mimick a JavaScript-style object syntax.
• "_" is converted to "." as an optional additional concatenator.
• "->" with a space on either side of it is converted back into a ".".
• Object references are then converted into global references (ie. $GLOBALS['object']->property). This can be changed in specific instances via the PHPShorthand::replaceGlobals() method.
• Single- and double-quoted strings are handled as special cases and are not transformed.
• [key] array indexes are expanded to their quoted form (ie. ['key']).

Examples

foo.bar ('foo.bar')

becomes:

$GLOBALS['foo']->bar ('foo.bar')

 

not isset (someArray[keyname])

becomes:

! isset ($GLOBALS['someArray']['keyname'])

 

foo.bar ge bar.foo and not empty (foo.asdf)

becomes:

$GLOBALS['foo']->bar >= $GLOBALS['bar']->foo && ! empty ($GLOBALS['foo']->asdf)

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