Syntax

CTPL supports 2 kind of data:

Raw data	The actual content of your template, or at least most of it: unparsed data that will remain unchanged.
Template blocks	The instructions that makes the template engine useful.

Raw data

There is no syntax for the raw data: everything that is not a template block is raw data. The only exception to this rule is that the template-blocks-delimiters { and } must be escaped using a backslash (\). For example, to produce a opening bracket, you need to write \{.

Template blocks

Template blocks are delimited with brackets: they are opened with an unescaped opening bracket ({) and closed with an unescaped closing bracket (}). All data inside these two brackets is template instructions.

There is 3 instruction types:

The for loop

The for loop allows to iterate over an array from the environment, and computes the loop body for each element in the array.

The syntax is the following:

1	{for <iterator> in <array>}<loop body>{end}

iterator is the variable name referring to the current array's element; array is the array over which iterate, as named in the environment; loop body is the data that will be evaluated on each iteration of the loop, and may contain any elements (raw data or instructions).

The if switch

The if block is a conditional branching.

The syntax is the following:

1	{if <expression>}<if body>[{else}<else body>]{end}

expression is an expression (see below) that will be evaluated to a boolean value, TRUE or FALSE.

If the expression evaluates to TRUE, the if body will be parsed. If the expression evaluates to FALSE, the else body will be parsed if any, or nothing will be done if the else is missing.

An expression

An expression that will be replaced by its computation result.

See CtplLexerExpr for details on the syntax of expressions. Basically, it may be any mathematical-like expression that may include reference(s) to variable(s).

Examples

Example 2. Short template

1
2
3

{for i in array}
  {i}
{end}

This example will output each item of array on a newline. Supposing the array [1, 2, 3], the output will be:

Example 3. Longer template

Here what may be a template for a member list HTML page:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Member list</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>List of our members<h1>
    <ul class="memberlist">
    {for member in members}
      <li>{member}</li>
    {end}
    </ul>
  </body>
</html>