Page 492 - Beginning PHP 5.3

Part III: Using PHP in Practice
How It Works
After creating an XHTML page header — including additional CSS rules to style the table — the script
includes the HTML_Table PEAR package:

require_once( “HTML/Table.php” );

Next, the script sets up an associative array of attributes for the opening <table> tag, then creates a
new HTML_Table object with these attributes:

$attrs = array( “cellspacing” => 0, “border” => 0, “style” => “width: 20em;
border: 1px solid #666;” );
$table = new HTML_Table( $attrs );

The two-cell table header row is then created by calling the object’s addRow() method, passing in an
array of cell data. Notice that the $type argument is set to “th” to ensure that header cells are created:

$table->addRow( array( “Sequence #”, “Value” ), null, “th” );

The rest of the script is much like the script in Chapter 4, with calls to HTML_Table methods replacing the
old HTML markup. After setting up the number of iterations and the two number variables, the first two
non-header rows of the table are created:

$table->addRow( array( “F₀”, “0” ) );
$table->addRow( array( “F₁”, “1” ) );

Within the loop, new rows are added to the table, again by calling addRow():

$table->addRow( array( “F_$i”, $num2 ) );
After the loop, the altRowAttributes() method is called to set up the alternate table rows. Counting
from the row after the header row, every second row is given a CSS class of “alt”:
$attrs = array( “class” => “alt” );
$table->altRowAttributes( 1, null, $attrs, true );
Finally, it’s just a case of calling the table object’s toHtml() method to display the table markup:

echo $table->toHtml();

You can see from this example how easy it is to create tables with HTML_Table. The resulting PHP
code is also clean and easy to modify. Furthermore, once you start using HTML_Table methods such as
setAutoGrow() and setCellContents() you can create — and modify — quite complex tables in
just a few lines of code.

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