Despite the already uber-relevant comments against building a new templating engine, I'd suggest breaking the string found. Taking your example of {{@Form::input("name")}}
, you'd have {{@CLASS_NAME::FUNCTION_NAME(params)}}. So using regex you could break the found string (as you already do), create an instance of or reference the class detected, then call the method parsed using a dynamic call (and obviously fail/error if either is not found).
As for the parameters, you could avoid qualifiers (quotes in this case) and break on every comma, or use the qualifiers and parse it differently via regex again. Your call. For each parameter parsed and found, they'd be added to the function call. In order to avoid eval
, and given the fact PHP does not support a random number of arguments (such as Python does with args
and kwargs
), having an array as the single parameter for the functions you'll use on the template files.
You could also have sort of an 'interface' function that accepts a certain number of parameters that then receives the function (or class + function names), counts the number of parameters it finds and finally relays the call to the actual underlying function based on the correct number of parameters found. Though the more you add the more obscure the processing becomes - assuming users of your templating engine will be able to define new template methods, it's a very bad idea to use this second route (as you'd have to support up to N parameters on these interface functions).