%div= ”

will always run htmlentities while

%div!= ”

will not (if the library was proberly implemented). haml-to-php.com is the only PHP HAML library which gets this right.

Now try writing option lists to see how easy it is:

%select
– foreach(array(‘red,’green’) => $color)
%option(value=$color selected=$color==’red’)$color

(Again: Most php implementations have a weak parser and can’t parse this)
. I agree – you should have a create_html_for_select() function. Thus just a line with != such as:

!= create_html_for_select(array(‘red’,'green’), ‘red’)

and != will insert the HTML verbatim into the template.