Tinsology

The other day I needed to populate a database with some placeholder content. Doing this manually was out of the question so I decided I’d find a text generator, specifically a Lorem Ipsum generator. For anyone unaware, Lorem Ipsum is non-sense, placeholder text used in publishing and design. It allows the developer to see their work completely populated with text, without having to actually create the text. Obviously, for this purpose, any kind of text generator would work to some extent, but traditionally Lorem Ipsum is used.

To get to the point, I successfully located several web-based generators, but no stand-alone PHP class or function. To be honest, I didn’t look too hard and someone a little more determined not to write any code most likely would have found it, but I decided to create my own PHP Lorem Ipsum generator. Here is a rundown of some of the features in the current version:

PHP Lorem Ipsum Generator
Version: 1.0
License: BSD

Download - Version 1.0

Features

• Generates content in three modes: Plain, HTML (content blocks nested in <p> tags), and Text (plain text in paragraph form)
• Sentences are punctuated and vary in length based on statistics collected here: http://hearle.nahoo.net/Academic/Maths/Sentence.html. Sentence length will vary on a Guassian distribution.
• HTML output is ‘clean-code’ formatted with tabs and new lines rather than just blobs of code
• More output formats to come…

Feel free to request additional features.

Usage

The only public method in the class is getContent.

Description
string getContent( int $wordCount [, string $format = html] [, boolean $loremipsum = true] )

Returns the desired amount of content as a string.

Parameters

wordCount
The number of words to be returned.

format
The output mode, one of ‘html’, ‘txt’, or ‘plain’. HTML by default.

• HTML: The content is divided into paragraphs, using the paragraph ( <p></p> ) tag.
• Text: The content is divided into paragraphs with the leading line of each paragraph tabbed
• Plain: The content is returned unformatted

loremipsum
Whether or not the content should begin with ‘Lorem ipsum’. True by default.

Example

require('LoremIpsum.class.php');

$generator = new LoremIpsumGenerator;

//100 words in html format
$generator->getContent(100);

//100 words without any formatting
$generator->getContent(100, 'plain');

//100 words with 'text' formatting
$generator->getContent(100, 'txt');

//100 words with html format, not beginning with lorem ipsum
$generator->getContent(100, NULL, false);

//or
$generator->getContent(100, 'html', false);

Additional Notes
Both the HTML and Text output modes use paragraph formatting. The mean word count of each paragraph is predetermined and can be set in the constructor, currently the default is 100. Note that this is the mean word count, the actual word count for each paragraph will vary in the same way the length of each sentence will vary.

Changelog
Version 1.1 (Planned)

• Additional output modes. List mode and possibly more

Version 1.0:

• Initial Release