Khamel — Something like a HAML parser in PHP

Invoking it

After including the main file khamel.php, you have to set two static variables:

Khamel::$template_path = './templates';
Khamel::$cache_path = '/tmp'; // You need write access to this directory

Afterwards, you can just use it like this:

$khamel = new Khamel('my_template'); // will parse ./templates/my_template.haml
echo $khamel;

Or, if you just want to output it and don’t care about the object that did all the work:

echo new Khamel('my_template');

Differences between HAML and Khamel

The biggest difference is that Khamel uses PHP syntax instead of Ruby syntax. In some places (esp. attribute hashes) the Ruby syntax will be translated to native PHP by the Khamel parser. A collection of the most important incompatibilites is listed below.

API conformance

Nearly none. I didn’t really care because it would require even more emulation of Ruby features. You basically give it a file name (without extension) and Khamel will do the rest.

Indenting

Khamel now indents using double spaces. The root element’s direct children (usually <head>, <body>) won’t get indented, because the root element’s output indent is -1. The static variable Khamel::$root_indent controls this feature.
Blocks indent their children if at least one of them is a block itself. Khamel knows about inline tags, all other tags are considered block tags. To emulate default HAML behaviour, make Khamel::is_inline_element() always return false.

Misc. differences

PHP encoding support is mostly a pain. The Khamel files come encoded as UTF-8. You should keep it as is. If you really need to change the output encoding, use ob_iconv_handler. Remember to generate the string first and apply encoding afterwards:

$str = (string) new Khamel('moo');
iconv_set_encoding('internal_encoding', 'UTF-8');
iconv_set_encoding('output_encoding', 'ISO-8859-15');
ob_start('ob_iconv_handler');
echo $str;