Parsing Text &amp; Formatting

Parsing Text & Formatting

bigc79

Hi there...

I was wondering if any of you have any quick ways of formating a raw text and masking where new lines are etc.

For instance say I have text with 2 paragraphs as shown below:

This is the first paragraph and just has standard text in it.

This is the second paragraph and has standard text as well as speach "As shown here".

Is there any way to go through the text (as would be put in in a text field to add to a MySQL database) and to have the PHP to state that at the end of the first paragraph there should be a \n\n and before the speach marks there should also be a \ . The texts that will be added are of some length and if I could make it so that a piece of script parses through and changes the text before adding it to the database it would be great.

I hope that made sence... if not feel free to mail me if you think that you might be able to help.

Thanks 4 the Help 🙂

As Always

Clive

bigc79

I have sorted out my problem, but if any of you are interested this is how I did it... there may be a better way and if you know of one, I am always open to suggestions.

// This just creates a text area to type in
// content and then sends the text in that
// text area back to the same page... I
// eventually want to send it to database to
// store the text, but for easy following
// this will print out on the screen what
// the formated text looks like.

// Creates the text area

// when the text is sent via the form back
// to this page.. (in this instance all
// characters such as > & < ") are changed
// to their HTML conter parts such as " is
// stored as "

// Then nl2br places in <br>'s for every
// line break. It is v.important to use the
// function nl2br() AFTER HTMLSpecialChars()
// otherwise \'s are placed around the < >
// braces.

<?php
$new = HTMLSpecialChars($text);
$print_new = nl2br($new);
echo $print_new;
?>
</form>
</body>

And there you go... that is how I did it.. hope that helps some of you out there....

As Always

Clive

bigc79

This follows on from "Solution To Parsing Text & Formatting"

The solution given, simply strips the text and places <br> on every new line... if using the code mentioned in "Solution To Parsing Text & Formatting" then if you add this following section of code the only <br>'s that are left are at the end of each paragraph.

// <?php
// $new = HTMLSpecialChars($text);
// $print_new = nl2br($new);

// this is the new code to leave just <br>'s
// at the end of paragraphs

$look_for = "([[:alnum:]\,.\'!\?*-\~_-])[[:space:]]<br>[[:space:]]([[:alnum:]\,.\'!\?*-\~_-])";
$replace = "\1 \2";
$print = ereg_replace($look_for, $replace, $print_new);

I hope that helps some of you out there that have had the same problem in formating text as I did.

As Always

Clive