php-loremipsum

Lorem ipsum generator in PHP without dependencies. Compatible with PHP 5.3+ as well as HHVM.

Origins

Once upon a time, I was attempting to find a lorem ipsum generator over on Packagist. I was presented with many options, and some of those options were good. Unfortunately, the bulk of those options depended on Symphony or the Zend Framework. This wouldn’t have been a big deal but under the circumstances, I wanted something that was not tightly coupled to these frameworks because I wanted to use the generator in my own framework.

I had decided to use badcow/lorem-ipsum because it did not have any dependencies nor did it rely on any external APIs. As I started to use the library, I found that I was going to have to fight with it to get it to do what I wanted. After digging through the code, I realized that I was going to end up gutting most of it to bend it to my will. I know when you overhaul someone’s code the liklihood of them accepting a pull request goes down dramatically, hence building this library while taking cues from it’s predecessor.

Also, the aforementioned package had a bunch of “setter” and “getter” methods that were grossing me out 😱

Installation

The preferred installation method is via composer. First add the following to your composer.json

"require": {
    "joshtronic/php-loremipsum": "dev-master"
}

Then run composer update

Usage

Getting Started

$lipsum = new joshtronic\LoremIpsum();

Generating Words

echo '1 word: '  . $lipsum->word();
echo '5 words: ' . $lipsum->words(5);

Generating sentences

echo '1 sentence:  ' . $lipsum->sentence();
echo '5 sentences: ' . $lipsum->sentences(5);

Generating paragraphs

echo '1 paragraph:  ' . $lipsum->paragraph();
echo '5 paragraphs: ' . $lipsum->paragraphs(5);

Wrapping text with HTML tags

If you would like to wrap the generated text with a tag, pass it as the second parameter:

echo $lipsum->paragraphs(3, 'p');

// Generates: <p>Lorem ipsum...</p><p>...</p><p>...</p>

Multiple tags can also be specified:

echo $lipsum->sentences(3, ['article', 'p']);

// Generates: <article><p>...</p></article><article><p>...</p></article><article><p>...</p></article>

And you can back reference using $1:

echo $lipsum->words(3, '<li><a href="$1">$1</a></li>');

// Generates: <li><a href="...">...</a></li><li><a href="...">...</a></li><li><a href="...">...</a></li>

Return as an array

Perhaps you want an array instead of a string:

print_r($lipsum->wordsArray(5));
print_r($lipsum->sentencesArray(5));
print_r($lipsum->paragraphsArray(5));

You can still wrap with markup when returning an array:

print_r($lipsum->wordsArray(5), 'li');

Assumptions

Instead of having an option as to whether or not a string should start the generated output with “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.” a few assumptions are baked in. The first string generated will always start with the traditional “Lorem ipsum…”. Subsequent strings may contain those words but will not explicitly start with them.

Contributing

Suggestions and bug reports are always welcome, but karma points are earned for pull requests.

Unit tests are required for all contributions. You can run the test suite from the tests directory simply by running phpunit .