$Id: API.txt,v 1.1 2006-12-31 01:41:50 eaton Exp $

Overview
========
In many cases, it's useful to allow users to define patterns or large
chunks of text that contain programmatically derived values. For example,
form email messages addressed to a given user, or url path aliases
containing the title of a given node. Both examples require bits of data
that vary each time the text is generated -- node titles, user ids, and
so on. Rather than forcing users to embed ugly snippets of PHP, or creating
elaborate and bizarre UIs for configuring the patterns via the browser,
it's most useful to give users a set of 'placeholder' tokens to place in
their text 



Providing Placeholder Tokens
============================
Token.module provides a small set of default placeholders for global values
like the name of the currently logged in user, the site's URL, and so on.
Any module can provide additional tokens by implementing two hooks.

  hook_token_values($type, $object = NULL)

  hook_token_list($type = 'all')

Detailed docs coming shortly. Read the code comments for the time being.



Using Token Replacement
=======================
To apply token replacement to a chunk of text, you have two options. The
first, and simplest, is:

  token_replace($original, $type = 'global', $object = NULL)

$original is the source text to perform substitutions on: it can be either
a simple string, or an array of multiple strings.

$type and $object are to be used when performing substitution based on a
particular Drupal object. Replacing tokens in an email with values from
a particular user account, or replacing tokens in a path alias pattern with
values from the node being aliased, are two examples.

$type should contain the general object type (node, comment, user, etc.)
while $object should contain the object itself.



Altering The Replacement Values
===============================
If your module needs to perform additional cleanup work on the replacement
values before doing the actual substitutions (cleaning replacement values
to make them appropriate for path aliasing, truncating them to a particular
length, etc.) you can manually retrieve the list of tokens and replacement
values, then call str_replace() yourself.

  token_get_values($type = 'global', $object = NULL)

Pass in the $type and $object as you would with the simpler token_replace()
function. The return value will be an array with tokens as keys to their own
replacement values.