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PHP › Template Engines (Blade & Twig)

How do control structures like loops and conditionals work within Blade and Twig templates, and how do they compare to writing the equivalent raw PHP directly inside an HTML file?

Intermediate

Answer

Both Blade and Twig provide their own clean, concise syntax for common control structures like foreach loops and if statements, which read more naturally within an HTML context compared to the more verbose syntax of mixing raw PHP tags directly into an HTML file, and this cleaner syntax makes templates easier for a wider range of team members, including those less familiar with PHP specifically, to read and modify confidently without needing to fully understand PHP's own control structure syntax.
{{-- Blade --}}
@foreach ($products as $product)
    <li>{{ $product->name }}</li>
@endforeach

{# Twig #}
{% for product in products %}
    <li>{{ product.name }}</li>
{% endfor %}
Real-world example A product listing page uses Blade's clean foreach directive to loop through and display a collection of products, producing far more readable template code compared to the equivalent mixed raw PHP and HTML tags approach.

Common follow-ups: What happens if the collection being looped over in a Blade or Twig loop happens to be completely empty?;Are there performance differences between using these template directives compared to writing raw PHP loops?