smarty/docs/programmers/api-variables/variable-auto-literal.md

$auto_literal

The Smarty delimiter tags { and } will be ignored so long as they are surrounded by white space. This behavior can be disabled by setting auto_literal to false.

::: {.informalexample}

<?php
$smarty->auto_literal = false;
?>

:::

See also Escaping Smarty parsing,