Help on Making a PHP Search Engine

[Anon]

hey, I need a little help...

I'm making a search engine, and I want all the words that are found in the pages of search results to be highlighted (css text background hightlight). That part is easy. Just eregi_replace the search words with highlighted text in the database content.

Now, if your still following me, let's say someone searches for "b" (yes, "b") and (since I have some HTML in my database) it will hightlight the HTML tag <B>
Therefore, messing the whole page up because PHP altered some of the original database HTML. I can't understand how to get it NOT to highlight the search text if it is in an HTML tag.

Any ideas? I'm currently using this code, which doesn't seem to work:

$formatted = eregi_replace("(($word[$i])(%[^{<(.)>]%)*)","<FONT} STYLE=\"background-color:#749BC0\">\1</FONT>",$formatted);

The above highlights the text, but it also highlights the HTML tags and messed up everything.

Bottom Line: I'm trying to highlight certain words from my database content without having PHP highlight the HTML tags.

[mwilson]

OK, what I usually do for search engines and this type of stuff is to only attempt to alter the non-html stuff, instead of doing something along the lines of;

echo eregi_replace(..., $unformatted);

I use something like;

&lt;html&gt;
...
Data: "<?php echo eregi_replace(..., $unformatted); ?>"
...
&lt;/html&gt;

This way I am guaranteed to only change the stuff I want to change and not any of the HTML. There may be another and possibly better way to do this in terms of coding time, but if you really want to be sure - there you go.

[Anon]

NOT POSSIBLE, I tried the same thing when developing my PHP search engine.

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