Personalization functions: capture

Capture is used to capture the content between the beginning and end tag into a variable. It works similar to assign, but can be used on much larger parts of code and also to make arrays. It captures a piece of code while processing the template and can be used later in the template.

The rawcapture function is extremely similar, but does not use HTML escaping. If you don't want to escape HTML please replace capture by rawcapture in the following examples.

Capture has many different functionalities. It can simply store information, store it in a variable or append to an existing variable. We will show its variables first and then show some examples on how to use them.

Variables

Only the name is required, the other two variables are optional. If you do not supply a name it will be set to 'default'.

Assigning without variable name

The following example shows how you can use a capture without assigning the content to a variable.

{capture name="someText"}
    This is some text that I would like to use later in the template.
{/capture}

The shorthand version looks like this:

{capture "someText"}
    This is some text that I would like to use later in the template.
{/capture}

To use the captured content you can use the following code:

{$smarty.capture.someText}

Assigning with variable name

In the previous example we retrieve the content of the capture with {$smarty.capture.someText}, but we can also assign a shorter variable name.

{capture name="someText" assign="myText"}
    This is some text that I would like to use later in the template.
{/capture}

The shorthand version looks like this:

{capture "someText" assign="myText"}
    This is some text that I would like to use later in the template.
{/capture}

To use the captured content you can use {$myText}.

In this example the text is so short the same could have been accomplished with assign, but you can place any part of the template you want into these variables (except HTML, which is only supported by rawcapture).

Using capture with arrays

If you want to use a more advanced technique it is possible to use an array in capture as well, which can be printed with foreach. This is particularly useful if you want to concatenate information from different places.

Storing information can be done similarly to the code below:

{capture append="information"}{assign "name" "Bob"}{$age}, {\capture}
{capture append="information"}{assign "age" "25"}{$age}, {\capture}
{capture append="information"}{assign "location" "the Netherlands"}{$age}{\capture}

While this is a lot of code, it only assigns three variables and combines them into another variable named information. This example also demonstrates how you can nest and combine functions.

Now let's use this variable in our template.

{foreach $information as $text}{$text}{/foreach}

What happens here is that we cycle through everything in information and print it after converting it to text. The final output looks like this:

Bob, 25, the Netherlands

More information

• Personalization
• Personalization functions
• Assign function
• Foreach function