Making single product info page in Laravel and ViewMore button

Question

Really new in Laravel and frameworks at all so please bear with me on this. I'm trying to learn it and I choose to write simple index page with few products ( title, price, image, description ). So far everything is there. Now I'm trying to put ViewMore button on the description section and when I click on button to load me new page with more information for this product.

This is the view of index page where I show all products and want to make button view more...

@if($product['image'])
    <img class="max-150" src="{{ $product['image'] }}" alt="{{{ $product['title'] }}}" />
     <br /><br />
@endif
@if($product['description_small'])
     <p>{{ $product['description_small'] }}</p>
     <p>{{ str_limit($product['description_small'], $limit = 250, $end = '<br><br> <a href="{{ URL::to('/product/single/' . $product['product_id']) }}" class="btn btn-primary">View More</a>') }}</p> 
@endif

For now I've got error in link of View More and the error says

production.ERROR: exception 'Symfony\Component\Debug\Exception\FatalErrorException' with message 'syntax error, unexpected 'product_id' (T_STRING)' in....

When I make it only with a href it's working great...

 <p><br><br> <a href="{{ URL::to('/product/single/' . $product['product_id']) }}" class="btn btn-primary">View More</a></p>

Answer 1

You were echo'ing within an echo ({{ {{ }} }}).

This works:

{{ str_limit($product['description_small'], $limit = 250, $end = '<br><br><a href="' . URL::to('/product/single/' . $product['product_id']) . '" class="btn btn-primary">View More</a>') }}

Though I find this piece of code a bit sloppy and hard to read, a cleaner approach would be:

$button = sprintf('<a href="%s" class="btn btn-primary view-more">View More</a>', URL::to('product/single/' . $product['product_id']));

echo str_limit($product['description_small'], 250, $button);

... or something like (which I like the most):

{{ str_limit($product->description, 250) }}

@if (strlen($product->description) > 250)
    <a href="{{ URL::to('product/single/' . $product->id) }} " class="btn btn-primary view-more">View More</a>
@endif

Don't use those nasty inline <br> tags, styling .btn.view-more with some CSS will do the trick :)