A trivially simple token-replacement tool (I hesitate to call it a 'library'). Given a token format (ie. '<<TOKEN>>' or '{TOKEN}') and a set of key-value pairs, we parse some body of text and replace those tokens with the appropriate values.

DISCLAIMER

I'm putting this code up more in an effort to 'get stuff out there' than because I think you should use this particular chunk of code.

This code was pretty basic, hacked together in a matter of a few hours for a particular client, whose needs were pretty specific (generating RTF files from a template based on user input to a web form, and possibly later extending the template without our input and without having to teach their staff PHP).

It's not the most elegant way to do this, and the code is pretty primitive (regexps are usually a suboptimal tool for a parser, but they were quick and easy to use in this case). Caveat emptor.

BASIC USAGE

A simple example... $string = "This is some <>. Tokens will be replaced by appropriate <>.";

$keysAndValues = array('TEXT'=>'tasty text', 'VALUES' =>'good times');

$tokenizer = new ScarletTokenizer();
$replaced_string = $tokenizer->setSource($string)
                    ->setTokenFormat('<<', '>>')
                    ->setInputs($keysAndValues)
                    ->replaceTokens();
echo $replaced_string;

Outputs:

This is some tasty text. Tokens will be replaced by appropriate good times.

REPEATING REPLACEMENTS

You can also do more complex things with repeating replacements. If a key-value pair in the input is an array, the corresponding token will be treated as containing other tokens that are to be replaced for all values. The text of the 'closing tag' of the repeated token group must be preceeded by a forward-slash (/) (similar to HTML tags).

Alright, that's hard to explain in text, so let me demonstrate:

$string = <<<EOT This is some more text. {TOKEN1} {MULTILINE} Field 1: {Value1} Field 2: {Value2} {/MULTILINE} <<<EOT;

$keysAndValues = array(
                'TOKEN1'=>'Obviously.', 
                'MULTILINE' => array(
                    array(
                        'Value1' => 'Hello',
                        'Value2' => 'World'
                    ),
                    array(
                        'Value1' => 'Foo',
                        'Value2' => 'Bar'
                    )
                )
            );
$tokenizer = new ScarletTokenizer();
$replaced_string = $tokenizer->setSource($string)
                ->setTokenFormat('<<', '>>')
                ->setInputs($keysAndValues)
                ->replaceTokens();

echo $replaced_string;

Outputs: This is some more text. Obviously.

    Field 1: Hello
    Field 2: World

    Field 1: Foo
    Field 2: Bar

NOTE: If you don't provide an array of inputs for a multi-line token, things will fall over horribly. We use the inputs during processing to determine if a token is a multi-line group or a one-off. This is a huge caveat and should definitely be fixed at some point in the future (but it worked for my particular case).

TESTS

Unit tests are provided in tests/. They're pretty simplistic coverage, but they should hit most of the cases we need to be sure of. If you plan to make changes to this code, you will need PHPUnit (http://www.phpunit.de/)

(On Ubuntu, it's as easy as 'apt-get install phpunit')

To run the tests, from the tests directory... > phpunit SimpleReplacementTests.php

Et voila!