preg_replace() help... argh...

sid

this damn preg replace will never work for me... what i need is the line of code that transforms this string

<a href="/gb/view.aspx?s=sid#argument1">argument2</a><br>

into this:

['argument2', 'argument1', '_self'];

with a statement like this:

<?
$lineCat = preg_replace("here i need your help", "and here too", $lineCat);
?>

thanks a whole lot in advance!!!

sid

xblue

two problems I can see
1) your pattern is missing the delimiters
2) your pattern will match a sequence of the characters "here i need your help" in $lineCat, which is not what you describe.

no, seriously, could you post where you got so far instead?

sid

Originally posted by xblue
two problems I can see
1) your pattern is missing the delimiters
2) your pattern will match a sequence of the characters "here i need your help" in $lineCat, which is not what you describe.

no, seriously, could you post where you got so far instead?

smartass... ;-)

well - i have this line of code - but that obviously does not do the job...


$catKey = "sid"; //value changes evey time cos its in a loop
$lineCat = "";

$lineCat = preg_replace("/<a href=\"/gb/view\.aspx\?s=" . $catKey . "#(.*?)\">(.*?)\<\/a><br>\"/i", "['\\2', '\\1', '_self'],", $lineCat);

the second argument in the preg replace statement looks like this - the board strips out one of the slashes each time... ['\2', '\1', '_self']

one of the problems i still have is, that im just not sure WHAT characters to escape (and why) in the preg_replace() pattern.

hope this helps... rock on - sid

sid

somebody? please?

xblue

okay, a couple of things:

you need to escape the delimiter if it occurs within the pattern, so it is a good idea to choose a delimiter that is not contained in the pattern if possible, e.g. % or §.

what else to escape: take a look here, these signs with special meaning (meta-characters) are listed, you just need to scroll down a bit:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcre.pattern.syntax.php

As for why to escape them, well because they have a special meaning, and if you wanted to match them literally, you would escape them to take away that special meaning, does that make sense?

sid

thanks - ill see if the syntax page gets be further...

As for why to escape them, well because they have a special meaning, and if you wanted to match them literally, you would escape them to take away that special meaning, does that make sense?

yep makes perfectly sense - and inst really news to me - it was more confusing, that i actually could choose any delimiter. that bit of info helped.

thanks for the hints - ill let you know if it got me anywhere!