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In MVC based architectures, working with template engines is an inevitable part of the development routine. It usually goes like this: we prepare and pass the data to the view. In the view, we print them based on our layout design.

Here is a basic example of how it works using Twig.

<?php

// Twig initialization

// Preparing data

$user     = 'user data';
$posts    = 'posts';
$comments = 'comments';

$twig->render('author.page', [

    'user'     => $user,
    'posts'    => $posts,
    'comments' => $comments,

]);

// ...

There are times, however, when the number of variables might be much higher than this: ten or more. In that case, we’ll have a tall list of variables (as an associative array), being passed to the respective template. It gets messy and unreadable quickly.

In this post, we’re going to talk about a trick for passing the defined variables to the view in a somewhat more convenient way: we can use the built-in compact() function to handpick the data we need:

Continue reading %Quick Tip: Convenience Hacks for Passing Data to Views%