Use Field Value or Placeholder Failing

[onionradish]

I want to make a general-purpose function to return either the text of a field or its placeholder value if the text is blank. I'm getting errors that I don't understand.

I've enabled the "_init.php" pre-processor from config.php with the intent to use it as a general controller to intialize variables that will be used by page templates. I've added the "global" keyword to the function to access the ProcessWire objects. I'm getting errors when it attempts to access page/field values. What am I doing wrong?

_init.php:

<?php
function text_or_placeholder($fieldname){
    global $page, $fields;
    $text = $page->get($fieldname);  # error here
    if (!$text){
        $text = $fields->get($fieldname)->placeholder;
    }
    return $text;
}
echo $page->get('jumbotron_headline');  # this works
echo $fields->get('jumbotron_headline')->placeholder;  # this works
echo text_or_placeholder('jumbotron_headline');  # this errors
?>

[adrian]

Hi @onionradish and welcome to the forums.

You need to make use of wire('page') etc when using inside a function.

[onionradish]

Thanks for the info -- I'd have never found it anywhere else. For reference to others, this is what worked:

_init.php

function text_or_placeholder($fieldname){
    $text = wire('page')->get($fieldname);
    if (!$text){
        $text = wire('fields')->get($fieldname)->placeholder;
    }
    return $text;
}

Is there somewhere I should have found it?

[adrian]

It's mentioned here: http://processwire.com/api/include/ although I think also somewhere else that I can't find right now.