I developed this library for a project where I had to replace the legacy PHP templates to Twig templates. The job was enormous: we had more than 16,000 PHP tags (sometimes with dozens of lines) in 400+ files.

So thanks to Templater I managed to successfully convert (almost barely) with automatic techniques, the 92% of the different tags, and the 85% of all the tags (the majority of the difference comes from the fact that block endings, like "}" cannot be converted without extra work).

So only ~2200 tags remained for manual conversion, but it came evident soon, that it's still too slow for me. Then I introduced "partial conversion", which means that a log file stores those tags which couldn't be fully converted, but some parts of them. It's very safe and useful for long, multiline tags: your templates are not threatened with partially working tags but you can copy the most parts of them to your template file.

Copy your original templates from your project's template directory to a safe location (e.g. name the folder as "my-converted-templates"). Then make another backup of it (e.g.: name it as "my-original-templates"). Now you can use Templater to modify your files in the "my-converted-templates" directory. Finally start "merging" your new templates with the original ones in your project. Remember to check for partial conversions! If you have to re-convert the tags, you can replace "my-converted-templates" with "my-original-templates".

The advantage of this method is that you can make as many retries as you want, and modify conversion options without affecting your manually converted tags. Of course, if you have an error in your manual work, you have to find a solution to efficiently correct it.

<?php
require "vendor/autoload.php";

use app\twig\TwigTemplate;

$converter= new TwigTemplate("extension_of_templates", "/path/of/templates", "name_of_the_project");

$converter->convertFromPHP();
$converter->setIsConvertStaticMethods(false);
$converter->setIsPartialConversionEnabled(true);
$converter->printConversionInfo();
$converter->saveConversion();
$converter->renameFileExtensions("twig");

In the temp directory, you will get three files:

• {name_of_the_project}-unsuccessful: These tags are not yet converted
• {name_of_the_project}-partial: These tags could have only been partially converted (only if partial conversion is enabled)
• {name_of_the_project}-successful: These tags were converted fully and successfully

You can inject your own searched and replacement tags to Templater. You have to add a {name_of_the_project}-injection.php file to the "temp" directory which returns an array. An example is:

return array(
    '/<\?php echo \$header; \?>/' => '{% include "header.twig" %}',
);

It will convert those tags which echo a variable named "header" into an included Twig template. Important to know, that Templater starts with the conversion of possible injected tags then continues with the automatic replacements.

You can also set static method conversion with TwigTemplate::setIsConvertStaticMethods(). Currently, Templater can only convert PHP static method invocations with the following signature:

<?php echo ClassName::methodName(); ?>

into Twig tags with the following signature:

{{ staticCall("ClassName", "methodName") }}

You have to ensure that a "staticCall" function is supported by your Twig environment (e.g.: by extending it).