(Yet another) preg replace question

[voice220]

Dear Readers,

I'd like to think that I'm a decent PHP coder, but one thing I haven't really dipped my head into are regular expressions. I need to replace a series of custom tags in a variable with different ones. I can do this with several substr_replace()s, but I'm sure it can be done with a single preg_replace().

I have a variable called $story, which holds several tags of the sort:

<<<picname.jpg>r>

and

<<<picname.jpg>l>

These are placeholders for where pictures should be. Basically the former should become

<a href='picname.jpg'><img src='thumbs/picname.jpg' border='0' align='right'></a>

...and the latter the same with left alignment.

As I said, it's most likely quite easy for someone versed in the hieroglyphs that are regular expressions. 🙂 Any help would be most appreciated!

[wizkid]

Hi,

try following:

$s = "<<<picname.jpg>l>";
$a = array('r'=>'right', 'c'=>'center', 'l'=>'left');
preg_match_all("|<<<(.*)>([a-z]{1})>|U", $s, $e);

echo "<a href='".$e[1][0]."'><img src='thumbs/".$e[1][0]."' border='0' align='".$a[$e[2][0]]."'></a>";

wizkid

[voice220]

Hi Wizkid,

Thanks for that. The problem is (and I should have mentioned this earlier) that the variable contains more than just those tags. Basically it contains a whole story, with those tags interjected where the pictures should be in the end.