How to use heredoc in CakePHP?

Question

Hi i googled i am not getting any cakephp heredoc. Please solve my problem

I want to use heredoc in CakePHP.

Code:

<?php
$qry = $this->Message->find("all");
$items = '';

$chatBoxes = array();

foreach ($qry as $chat) {    
    $items .=
        <<<EOD
        {
           "s": "0",
           "f": "{$chat['Message']['from']}",
           "m": "{$chat['Message']['text']}"
        },
        EOD;
}
pr($items); exit;
?>

Above heredoc code not working getting following error message

Fatal Error

Error: syntax error, unexpected $end
File: E:\xampp\htdocs\2014\datingscanner\datingscanner\app\Controller\MessagesController.php
Line: 142

Notice: If you want to customize this error message, create app\View\Errors\fatal_error.ctp

Edit:

If i fetch the single value from databse it works fine.

  $items .= $chat['Message']['from'];

Answer 1

This isn't a CakePHP specific problem. A valid heredoc must have no other characters before the closing identifier (you have whitespace), so it should look like:

    <<<EOD
    {
       "s": "0",
       "f": "{$chat['Message']['from']}",
       "m": "{$chat['Message']['text']}"
    },
EOD;
^ no whitespace or anything else before the close identifier

From the Manual:

Warning It is very important to note that the line with the closing identifier must contain no other characters, except a semicolon (;).

Side note: you appear to be manually building a JSON string. PHP has a built in functions to deal with JSON, so you can work with an array or object and have it transformed into JSON.

$items = array();

foreach ($qry as $chat) {
    $items[] = array(
        's' => '0',
        'f' => $chat['Message']['from'],
        'm' => $chat['Message']['text']
    );
}

echo json_encode($items);

The above creates the same JSON that your current code creates. This way is better because json_encode() will always produce valid JSON, and it will escape special characters that would otherwise break the JSON format.