Rodney Rehm

Every now an then the need for fine-grained whitespace control pops up in the smarty forums. While Smarty itself doesn't offer whitespace control functionality, we can easily implement it ourselves.

For the release of Smarty 3.1.0 I refactored most of Smarty's disk access. As this optimization from September 2011 kept popping up questions on the Smarty forums, I finally felt the need to explain what I did. Although Smarty is the reason I discovered this, this post applies to PHP in general, not Smarty in particular. This post is all about laying the groundwork for you to realize two things:

1. Your operations are not atomic
2. Avoid accessing the hard disk unnecessarly

Many tools come with an installation / setup / configuration procedure. At this stage directories needed by the tool or its components usually don't yet exist. For Smarty based systems this poses a problem, as Smarty writes compiled templates to a designated directory. So if the installer is built upon Smarty, the developer is presented a hen/egg problem.