Auto Tag words in PHP

Anon

I have a (dictionary)table (mySQL) with words and definitions, what I want is that when somebody was to Submit a form, I want it to check one of the fields in the form, with all the words in the "dictionary table", and if there is a match to automatically put HREF tags in the form input so that it will now have links to the word in the dictionary. I just don't know where to start with this, any help on how to parse the info in the form with the words in the table would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Anon

I would go about it like this:

first, make an array of all of the words that were submitted from the "form". Now, (I'm assuming that gpc_magic_quotes are on, if they are not, make sure to add apropriate escaping), create a query that looks like:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM dict WHERE word IN ('".implode("', '", $words_from_form)."');";

Now, loop through the results of the query and replace a space-theword-space with space-href-theword-closehref-space, or so to speak. Hope that helps 🙂

Chris King

cordex

$forminput = preg_replace("/[^{[:alnum:]|[:space:]]/","",$forminput);}
$wordarray = explode(" ",$forminput);

This'll get you an array of words. Cycle through this array and run your mySQL comparison query.

The ones that match, place in yet another array. Before the text is output, cycle through the new array with the matches and do a str_replace() to swap out the words for links.

orangewhip

Sweet! THanks all, I should be able to work it out now!

orangewhip

OK so this is what I came up with, but doesn't work. Sorry about this, I am fairly new to PHP and not sure if I'm doing this right. Here is the code I wrote (with your help of course)

//Automatically find words that are in dictionary and replace them with links in the form input

function DictEncode($forminput){
$forminput = preg_replace("/[^{[:alnum:]|[:space:]]/","",$forminput);}
$wordarray = explode(" ",$forminput);

//Connect to database and find words
$db=mysql_connect("localhost","username","password");
mysql_select_db("databasename",$db);

$query = "SELECT * FROM dict WHERE word IN ('".implode("', '", $wordarray)."');";
$result = mysql_query($query);

$replacedict= array("<A HREF=home.php?m_column_id=php_dict/result.php?word=$result>$result</A>");
return str_replace(stripslashes($result),stripslashes($replacedict),stripslashes($forminput) );

}