Outputting Variables

Outputting Variables
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The most fundamental concept when writing templates is how to output a variable. All variable names are preceded by a dollar symbol. To output a variable, surround its name with curly braces. The following listing demonstrates this.

Example A.1. Outputting a variable called $title

<html>
    <head>
        <title>{$title}</title>
    </head>
    <body> ... </body>
</html>

This is the most common way to use templates. You can output variables in this manner for all types apart from arrays and associative arrays; with arrays you will typically loop over the array and then output each value, whereas with associative arrays you will access one of the values in the array directly.

Variable Modifiers

Modifiers allow you to make a last minute change to a variable when outputting it. This is achieved by adding a pipe symbol (|) and the modifier name after the variable name.

For example, if you have a modifier called date_format, you could modify the variable $timestamp using {$timestamp|date_format}. If the $timestamp variable originally contained a timestamp value, then this may result in output such as Jan 1, 2010.

There are a number of modifiers available, each of which is documented in the Smarty Template Engine manual. Two useful examples of these are escape and date_format.

Escaping Content

Escaping content is the process of modifying variable content to ensure your site displays content correctly and is not susceptible to cross-site scripting (XSS) or cross-site request forgeries (CSRF). It is also useful for ensuring your site remains a valid HTML document.

When you escape content, you prevent HTML tags being output in your variables. This is achieved with the escape modifier. A good example of this is when your variable contains an ampersand (&).

Example A.2. Escaping content to maintain standards compliance.

<html>
    <head>
        <title>{$title|escape}</title>
    </head>
    <body> ... </body>
</html>

Outputting Dates and Times

In several of the template types there is date/time data made available for output. This value is in a special timestamp format, but you can output the timestamp into a "human-readable" format using the date_format modifier.

You can optionally pass an argument to date_format which indicates how the timestamp should be formatted. A full list of the available formatting strings are available at .

Note

The following examples use the built-in $smarty.now timestamp. You can use this variable for the current date/time.

Example A.3. Outputting timestamps using date_format.

Jan 1, 2010
{$smarty.now|date_format}

1 January 2010
{$smarty.now|date_format:'%e %B %Y'}

12:00:00
{$smarty.now|date_format:'%T'}

1 January 2010 @ 12:00:00
{$smarty.now|date_format:'%e %B %Y @ %T'}