Looping through text using regexpt

Anon

Hi!
I have a nasty problem. I'm currently writing a script which gets, converts and puts plain text data from one db to another.
The tricky part is the conversion, there are multiple URLS in text which is saved in TEXT fields. Now I want to change thos URLS so they work with my new system.

e.g.
qc.php3?myaction=show&type=chart&wkn=123456&id=1
should change into:
qc.php3?ma=ch&m=1&sym=AAA

now building the regexp to do that is rather easy, the püroblem is there are multiple of those URL's in each text field, and I somehow have to loop through the whole text to change them all, because to get the 'AAA' symbol I have to do a database query depending on the '123456' wkn from the initial URL.

I searched the net for some time now but have no clue how to write while-type statements with regexp support. If I create just one ereg_replace it of corse replaces all occurences of any such URL with the same one.

any help is greatly appreciated!

mats99

Anon

You just need to first extract the urls out of each file, parse them for the query string, and then use the function parse_str to parse the query string into an array to get it's values. Then reconstruct the url with your new query string and do a str_replace of the old url with the new one you have created.

Search the PHP sites and you will find the regex that returns all the urls, in this code I will reference it as function "getAllHrefs()".

$contents = join("",file($your_file));
$orig_urls = getAllHrefs($contents);

foreach($orig_urls as $old_url)
{
$url_parts = parse_url($old_url);
if(strlen($url_parts["query"]) > 0)
{
parse_str($url_parts["query"], $values);
// $values now contains the values for
// the url you are working with. You
// can use them in database queries etc
// e.g. $values["wkn"] will return 123456
// from the url above.
// Do your database stuff and build your new
// query string.
$new_url = "http://your_server.com/".$url_parts["path"]."?".$your_new_query_str;
$contents = str_replace($old_url, $new_url, $contents);
}

}
$fp = fopen($your_file,"w");
fwrite($fp, $contents);
fclose($fp);

Good luck!
Jack

Anon

Here's that code again, hopefully this time with some formating:

$contents = join("",file($your_file));
$orig_urls = getAllHrefs($contents);

foreach($orig_urls as $old_url)
{
   $url_parts = parse_url($old_url);
   if(strlen($url_parts["query"]) > 0)
   {
      parse_str($url_parts["query"], $values);
      // $values now contains the values for
      // the url you are working with. You
      // can use them in database queries etc
      // e.g. $values["wkn"] will return 123456
      // from the url above.
      // Do your database stuff and build your new
      // query string.
      $new_url = "http://your_server.com/".$url_parts["path"]."?".$your_new_query_str;
      $contents = str_replace($old_url, $new_url, $contents);
   }
}
$fp = fopen($your_file,"w");
fwrite($fp, $contents);
fclose($fp);

Anon

thnx