Smarty

[bmpowell]

I'm working on a fairly large CMS project with Smarty as the output templating engine. We have a lot of queries involving multitable joins, and sometimes we end up with duplicate field names between the tables.

I have my PHP code so that it returns the results in an array keyed on table.field, where there is actually a period as a separator. When I'm writing my Smarty templates, how can I tell Smarty that 'table.field' is actually the key for one array and not a pair of nested arrays? All my attempts have either resulting in PHP errors, Smarty just appending the 'table.field' part as text to the end of the array, or it still thinking there are nested arrays.

Any help would be appreciated. I'd prefer to continue using periods in my array keys for simplicity, but I know I might have to change to something else.

[mohrt]

Short answer, don't use periods in key names, at least not for template variables. Rename foo.bar to foo_bar. There may be hoops you can jump through to get around this but generally speaking, you're better off avoiding them.

[boots]

renaming is best but you can also use ugly intermediates:

{assign var=temp value="bad.key"}
{$foo.$temp}

[orrd]

I'm wondering if there is a better fix for this that has been developed over the last 5 years since this was originally posted?

It seems that a good syntax would be {$foo[bad.key]}. Another alternative syntax could be {$foo.bad\.key}. But those don't seem to work either (at least in my Smarty 2.x installation).

[U.Tews]

Smarty3 does accept {$foo['bad.key']}.

For Smarty2 the workaround of boots is still valid. We will not change the syntax.