[SOLVED] Strange behaviour of $files->include when using text variables

[LAPS]

Hi, in my template file I state the following code:

// File: template_name.php
$files->include('path/to/filename', array(
  'key1' => "Some text value 1", // e.g. $page->title
  'key2' => "Some text value 2", // e.g. $page->getLanguageValue('default', 'title')
  'keyN' => "Some text value N"
));

In path/to/file_name.php I state the following code:

// File: path/to/file_name.php
$key1 = $vars['key1'] | "Default1";
$key2 = $vars['key2'] | "Default2";
$keyN = $vars['keyN'] | "DefaultN";
// ...
echo $key1 . "<br>";
echo $key2 . "<br>";
echo $keyN . "<br>";
// ...

When I render the above code in the front-end then I get the text values changed! That is, it outputs something like the following:

Rdfs~{{ value1
GDdfgsd value2
dfd]~df value3

Am I doing something wrong?

 

 

Update

In path/to/file_name.php  just use ?: instead of |, this way:

// File: path/to/file_name.php
$key1 = $vars['key1'] ?: "Default1";
$key2 = $vars['key2'] ?: "Default2";
$keyN = $vars['keyN'] ?: "DefaultN";
// ...
echo $key1 . "<br>";
echo $key2 . "<br>";
echo $keyN . "<br>";
// ...

PHP matters...

[MoritzLost]

Just for the curious, your garbled text error was caused by using the wrong operator. A single pipe character (|)  is the bitwise OR-operator in PHP. Bitwise operators perform comparisons on the bits of integer values. They aren't really useful for strings, as the results are pretty much random. From the PHP manual:

Quote

If both operands for the &, | and ^ operators are strings, then the operation will be performed on the ASCII values of the characters that make up the strings and the result will be a string.

What you were looking for is probably the logical OR operator (||). However, your original $key1 assignment still wouldn't work because of operator precedence in PHP:

$key1 = $vars['key1'] || "Default1";

// executed as
$key1 = ($vars['key'] || "Default1");

In this case the OR operation will be executed first, and the expression will always evaluate to true because non-empty strings are true-ish. Then the result of the expression is assigned to $key1.

A cleaner way that works and will never throw errors:

$var1 = !empty($vars['key']) ? $vars['key'] : 'Default1';

In PHP 7 you can use null coalescing:

$var1 = $vars['key'] ?? 'Default1';

Keep in mind that this will only assign the default value if $vars['key'] is NULL, but not if it is (int) 0 or an empty string!