The Bakery Everything CakePHP

I recently stumbled across an urge to output clean HTML/XHTML on all my pages without having to worry much about writing the actual markup. Being able to do this would allow me to generate clean markup in all cases (at the cost of performance, of course).

Now, before starting, please note that you will need the php-tidy extension. You can read more at http://php.net/tidy.

Now, onto the good stuff. The solution I came to (thanks to AD7six) was creating a helper. I called this the TidyFilterHelper (I thought that TidyHelper may have been a bit misleading in this case).

You simply create the tidy_filter.php helper file, drop it in APP/views/helpers/.

The code is as follows:

Helper Class:

Download code <?php 
class TidyFilterHelper extends AppHelper {
    function __construct()
    {
        ob_start();
    }
    
    function __destruct()
    {
        $output = ob_get_clean();
        $config = array('indent' => true, 'output-xhtml' => true);
        $output = tidy_repair_string($output, $config, 'utf8');
        
        ob_start();
        echo $output;
    }
}
?>
Now that is pretty cool. It would've been cooler if Helper::afterLayout() was a working callback (it's defined in Helper, it's documented, just not implemented as a callback yet.. but it will be soon!)

Now that you've got the helper in place, all you need to do is add the appropriate entry into your AppController::$helpers array, if you want to apply it to absolutely all output.

If you still don't understand, try this:

Controller Class:

Download code <?php 
class AppController extends Controller {
    var $helpers = array('TidyFilter', '...some of your other helpers...');
}
?>
Everything will now work automatically.

Happy baking!