Ummm ... so what is wrong with Perl's sprintf? Why would you need to name the placeholders? If you need that, then you really need a templating language.

my $hello = sprintf "Hai %s! Time: %s\n" => $name, scalar(localtime);
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PHP has sprintf too, you know. To use database placeholders in PHP you need to look to PEAR, but if you don't want that you can always use sprintf to give placeholders to your code:

    $results = array();

    foreach ($tables as $table) {

        $sql = sprintf("
                SELECT id,
                    %s as customer,
                    status,
                    status_error,
                    submit_datetime,
                FROM stats.%s
                WHERE direction = %s
            ",
            $config['customer_field'],
            $table,
            $config['direction'],
        );

        $results[$table] = $dbh->exec( $sql );
    }

    return $results;
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L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)