Load PHP view file from controller with given parameters - php

Question

I have a simple controller file StudentController.php
<?php
$data = array();
$data["firstName"] = $_GET["firstName"];
loadView("StudentView.php", $data);
?>
I have a even simpler view file called StudentView.php
<?php
echo $firstName;
?>
I have absolutely no idea how to implement loadView($view, $data) function. I want variables from $data in controller became available in view ($data["foo"] from controller became $foo in view)
I want achieve what is very easy to do in CodeIgniter but I have no idea how it is implemented. I tried to look into Controller.php and Loader.php in source files, but it was too messy for me to understand.
I don't want to use CodeIgniter or any other framework, I want to natively do in PHP.

Answer 1

If you're going to be building a large website to be used by the general public, a framework is generally a good idea for multiple reasons:
Properly unit tested - generally speaking, you can be confident that the core of your website is functioning as it's intended to
Community support - have questions and you can easily get answers; generally these frameworks are open sourced and usually actively developed by the PHP community
Secure - Framework developers are, well, framework developers; and they have been trained to write code with security as a top priority
However, this question has nothing to do with frameworks vs not, so I'll answer the question you asked with a very simple function:
function loadView($view, $data) {
extract($data);
ob_start();
require_once $view;
$contents = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
return $contents;
}
You can chose to return the contents or print them directly, but that function should do what you need. I'm making no guarantees about the security of this code, and I have obviously done no error checking. But it should serve as a great foundation to get you started.