The Perceptus Back Story

Sigh.  We discovered a bug in our recently reworked tools.perceptus.ca (“PWT”) site.

We have a simple, custom, partial MVC system that runs a few of our smaller websites.  That system uses the PEAR HTML_Template_IT package to do the final template rendering. We ported PWT to our MVC to make future site changes much easier.

A week after going live with the changes, we found a baffling bug.  The tools were eating the dollar sign and dollar amounts (but not the decimals) from the input text. E.g. “$103.00” would get returned as “.00”.  Not good.

Apparently, HTML_Template_IT defaults to processing all text with regex.  Not cool.

There might be a historical reason for this, but for new users, this has got to be confusing. Plus, this is NOT mentioned in the intro documentation: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.html.html-template-it.intro.php

We’re not the only ones caught by this: http://pear.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=50.

The fix is to initialize and set the use_preg option, like this:

$tpl = new HTML_Template_IT(‘./’,array(‘use_preg’=>true));

I have glanced at the package pages, and while this behavior is  documented it is buried quite deeply in the documentation.

This also explains a typo we had years ago on a static page that had the text like $5 in it.  That time, we just changed the copy to read 5 dollars and got on with life.

Tags: bug, documentation, dollar, eat, pear, php, regex, template

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 29th, 2010 at 12:07 am and is filed under annoying, PHP, programming, tools.perceptus.ca. 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.