Switch statement in PHP injected HTML

Question

<? switch ($var): ?>   <? case 1: ?>     It's 1!   <? break ?> <? endswitch ?> 

I want to do something like that, in other words use the switch statement in PHP templates. This is possible with the if statement. The above code generates Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_INLINE_HTML, expecting T_ENDSWITCH or T_CASE or T_DEFAULT in PHP 5.3. The PHP docs suggests that this should be possible.

Can someone confirm that this doesn't work, or rather, tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I read in the php doc that your example should not work.

Any output (including whitespace) between a switch statement and the first case will result in a syntax error. For example, this is invalid

Try this instead:

<div> <?php switch($variable):  case 1: ?>     <div>     Newspage     </div> <?php break; ?> <?php case 2: ?>     </div>     Forum     <div> <?php break; ?> <?php endswitch; ?> </div> 

http://php.net/control-structures.alternative-syntax

Answer 2

You have

?>\n\n<? 

after your switch which becomes

switch($var): echo "\n\t"; case 1: 

Think of your script as PHP with HTML in it, rather than embellished HTML. The PHP binary gets the file first.

You might like to use something like HEREDOC to echo out unescaped HTML.