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I’m a big fan of the PHP framework, CodeIgniter. However, until recently it has lacked an elegant way of nesting an image in an anchor tag. I had to resort to manually typing out HTML like this:
<a href="<?=site_url?>/controller/action"><img src="<?=base_url()?>/images/button.gif"></a>
CodeIgniter 1.6 has been released, quickly followed by 1.6.1. This includes an image helper. One is still unable to elegantly link images using CI’s helpers. If you want to be able to do something like this:
<?= anchor( 'controller/action', img( 'images/button.gif' )?>

You could just comment out line 117 in /system/helpers/url_helper.php but that means you are altering CI core, which is not a good idea. For a start it will be overwritten when you upgrade and it is an inelegant hack.

A better bet is to create your own helper file and use it to override CodeIgniter’s one. This is dead-simple, just create a file called MY_url_helper.php in the following location /system/application/helpers/. Note that the MY_ prefix is set in the config.php file under $config['subclass_prefix'] = 'MY_'; so if you have changed that setting you will need to adjust your file-name accordingly.

Then just copy and paste the following in to it:

< ?php  if (!defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

if (! function_exists('anchor'))

{

 function anchor($uri = '', $title = '', $attributes = '')

 {

 	$title = (string) $title;		if ( ! is_array($uri))

 	{

 	$site_url = ( ! preg_match('!^\w+://!i', $uri)) ? site_url($uri) : $uri;

 	}

 	else

 	{

 		$site_url = site_url($uri);

 	}

if ($title == '')

 	{

 		$title = $site_url;

 	}

if ($attributes == '')

 	{

 		// $attributes = ' title="'.$title.'"';

 	}

 	else

 	{

 		$attributes = _parse_attributes($attributes);

 	}

return ''.$title.'';

 }

}

?>

Tags: CodeIgniter, php, source code

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 15:42 GMT and is filed under CodeIgniter, Development, Frameworks, PHP, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.