Function to change an Object ID

Anon

In my database, I am building a table called "Photos" to organise an ever-increasing collection of fashion photographs (and their respective thumbnails). At the same time, I am organising my website's written articles in another table ("Articles").

My "Photos" table carries a field (ThumbPath) with the full "http://" path to the thumbnail of a photo, and a field (FullPath) with the full "http://" path to the full-sized photo. So far, so good.

My "Articles" table contains a 'longblob' field called "Content" to contain the HTML-tagged text that makes up each specific article that I have written. In many of my articles, I will need to feature thumbnails of photos from the "Photos" table. HOWEVER, these will not be placed at uniform points, and while one article might contain ten thumbnail images, another might only have one or two....

Therefore, I am told that I could place Object IDs - for example: <? placephoto=6435 ?> - into the HTML code where I would normally put <img> tags for thumbnails, and then create a function in my PHP scripts to convert any of these object references into HTML. Correct?

The conversion would begin by finding the correct image record in the database. Then it would generate HTML <img> tags at that point in the article, based around the thumbnail path from that record, and thus hopefully show a thumbnail on the article at the specific place I placed the object ID. What I would also need to do is wrap the generated <img> tags with an <a href> to point to a PHP script specifcally for displaying the full-sized images one-at-a-time from the database, this time placing the image ID number at the end of the link, for example /showimage.php?=6435

Is my train of thought correct so far?

So ultimately, I want to convert any occurences of:

<? placephoto=xxx ? >

into this:

...I am 99.9% sure that this is done by regular expressions or function calls, but I'm absolutely stuck on coding it properly. (The PHP manual is confusing me more than its helping!)...

HELP PLEASE!!!

Anon

Cute problem.

So basically what you have is a large string or collection of strings,
in which you want to find surtain keyswords, and replace them by other text.

I don't think you will want to do this with regularexpressions, as in this case that will probably drive you nuts.
You don't really have to replace text before you print it, you just have to print something else instead.

I would use the strpos() or something to find the first <? marker.
Then I would print everything leading up to that point.

Then I would grab everything that is between the <? and the ?>
and explode() that around the "=" sign, giving me a key and value.
Then I would print the code for the thumbnail and image link according to the value of the key I just found.
Then I would restart the whole process starting at the last ?> I found.

Anon

Any chance of some example code for this?

I'm very much the newbie at PHP, and while the explanations of how to do something like this are pointing me in the right direction of a solution, I have no idea how to turn the theory into working code.

Anon

We all have to start somewhere...

here you go.

Any suggestions on a cleaner/faster method are much appreciated

<?
$line = "hello, this is a <? id=2 ?> string that needs some <? id=4 ?> work";

while we can find "<?" markers

while ($last_pos=strpos($line,"<?"))
{

print what is in front of marker

print substr($line,0,$last_pos)."\n";

# Trash what is in front of the marker
$line = substr($line,$last_pos);

# Find the end marker
$last_pos = strpos($line,"?>")+2;

# Get what is between the markers, +3 and -6 to get rid of the markser themselves plus the spaces around the markers
$replace_me = substr($line,3,$last_pos-6);

# get the key and value
$pieces=explode("=",$replace_me);
print "img src=image.php?$pieces[1]\n";

# trash the part between and including the markers.
$line = substr($line,$last_pos);
$last_pos = strpos($line,"<?",0);

};

Don't forget to print the last bit, the part that is left when no more markers exist!

print $line;
print "\n";
?>