[Idea] make render variables 'key' => 'value' not mandatory

[Nayte91]

Hello,

It's more about Symfony controller but as it directly impact twig usage, I feel it's a better place here.

Currently in a template, when you pass arguments and it has the same name than a variable, you can save a bit:

{{ path('app_replay_index', {event: event}) }}
{# ...can be compressed like... #}
{{ path('app_replay_index', {event}) }}

It acts like in JS, so that's a nice trick to get the code more readable.
I wonder if we could allow the same in the render method of AbstractController?

return $this->render('template.html.twig', [
    'sameAsVariable' => $sameAsVariable,
    'not_same' => $foo,
]);
// .. Cannot be compressed like...
return $this->render('molecules/replay/search_preview.html.twig', [
    $sameAsVariable,
    'not_same' => $foo,
]);

Not sure if it's hard technically or if levers some problems, but for behavior alignment purpose and for a nice DX improvement in controllers, I feel like it can be cool.

Thank you for reading and sorry if it's naive!

[stof]

This is a feature request you would have to send to PHP, not to Twig, as you are asking about a different way to write a PHP associative array.
There is no way to emulate that when receiving an array that does not have string keys, as there is no way to know the name of the variable that was used when building the array (it has to be something done when parsing the code).

But this would be rejected anyway, because [$sameAsVariable, 'not_same' => $foo] is already valid PHP code that has a different behavior, and so it would be impossible to make sure RFC pass in PHP (Twig and JS were able to introduce this shortcut syntax because they have different delimiters { } vs [ ] making it unambiguous). So I don't think it is worth spending your time sending such feature request to the PHP team.

[Nayte91]

Hello, thank you for your answer,

Ohh got it. As soon as I enter in the render() method, the variable names ($sameAsVariable, $foo, ...) are lost and replaced by the variables value(s). And it doesn't seem to has any way to retrieve it (backtrace, reflection, ...) in PHP, so yeah, that's a dead end.

That's too bad because as Twig doesn't like variables as int (if you want to call your key 1, then you will have trouble to access it from your template), there were a room to replace all int keys by the variable name.

Sorry for your time!

[GromNaN]

For your information, but I don't recommend it as not properly supported by static analysis, you can use the compact function to create an associative array using variable names.

[stof]

@Nayte91 it is not "as soon as you enter the render function", but "as soon as the array is created", which happens before. That's why I said previously that such shortcut requires updating the syntax of the language at the parser level. It cannot be a runtime feature.