Parsing user formatted input

rgesse

I want to allow non-html literate users to mark up text with bold, italics, email, list etc. tags. I have created an app. that creates something like this for a bulleted list:
[BULLET]Computer literate in Microsoft Excel and Word.[/BULLET]
[BULLET]Minimum grade 12 education or equivalent.[/BULLET]
[BULLET]Ability to work independently, as well as part of a team.[/BULLET]

I then wrote a script that parses everything properly except for the list tags. For the list tags the following is the script I wrote:

/ Numbered List/
if (ereg('[NUMBER]', $newtext))
{
$inlist = true;
$newtext = str_replace('[NUMBER]', '<ol type=1><li>', $newtext);
//echo "TEST --> HTML for FIRST line item ";
do
{
if (ereg('[/NUMBER][NUMBER]', $newtext) or ereg('[/NUMBER] [NUMBER]', $newtext) or ereg('[/NUMBER]\n[NUMBER]', $newtext) )
{

$newtext = str_replace('[/NUMBER][NUMBER]', '</li><li>', $newtext);
//echo "TEST --> HTML for NEXT item in list ";
$inlist = true;
}
else
{

$newtext = str_replace('[/NUMBER]', '</li></ol>', $newtext);
//echo "TEST --> HTML for END of list ";
$inlist = false;
}
}while ($inlist = true);
}

The problem is the following....it never finds the [/BULLET][BULLET] tags and therefore creates an endless loop. I'm thinking that I have to allow for space or a '\n' in between the tags. My question is: "How do I do this????" If anyone has a suggestion, I would kindly appreciate it. Thank you in advance.

trippyd

for starters, the brackets you are using ([ and ]) have specific meaning within a regular expression, and won't hit on [BULLET].

rgesse

Yeah, your right....I wasn't coding this properly anyway. The way I perform the other replacements is like this:
eg.
/ Bold /
$newtext = str_replace('', '', $newtext);
$newtext = str_replace('', '', $newtext);

I came to the conclusion that I should ry something like this for the list tags:

/ Numbered List/
$newtext = str_replace('[/NUMBER][NUMBER]', '</li><li>', $newtext);
$newtext = str_replace('[/NUMBER] [NUMBER]', '</li><li>', $newtext);
$newtext = str_replace('[/NUMBER]\n[NUMBER]', '</li><li>', $newtext);

$newtext = str_replace('[NUMBER]', '<ol type=1><li>', $newtext);
$newtext = str_replace('[/NUMBER]', '</li></ol>', $newtext);

I perform the first three lines as I am trying to allow for spaces or a line break. Based on the other tags this should work. However it still cannot find the desired tags. Does anybody have an idea if there is a function that ignores whitespace.

HELP!