Multiple images within text

webchef

Hello, and thanks in advance for any help...

Lets say i have a database table where the most important fields are the date fields (year, month, and day), the article id (auto_id), and the article body text (body).

each article may or may not contain 1 or more related pictures. The pictures are named according to the date. for example, 2002_10_04_01_01.jpg, and 2002_10_04_01_02.jpg belong to the article for October 04th, 2002.

for clarification:

for 2002_10_04_01_02.jpg:
2002 = year
10 = month
04 = day
01 = auto_id

02 = second picture

When i print out the text from the database i also have to include the pictures spread out among the text. I can retrieve the text easy, and the pictures as well. But how do i code it so the pictures spread out evenly among the text? how do i wrap the text around the pictures?

You can see the problem i have. if it was only one picture per article it would be easy, but thats not always the case. I want one picture with the first paragraph, if there only one more picture, i want it half way down the page, if there are more than 2 then maybe every 3rd or 4th paragraph.

Sounds difficult to me.. but you are the experts.. so please help.

Thanks
Mike

leatherback

Hi,

Just some creative thinking here:

If you can count the number of pictures (Which I assume you can, using something like mysql_num_rows() ) then you kno whow many pictures you have (duuhh..).

Then you could clip the textstring accordingly. You count the number of chars / length of your text, and split the text. But maybe you have to explode the text first by ".":

Explode text
Set couter to number of individuel sentences
Recreate text, by adding, meanwhile keep a count of the number of chars
After you have passed a certain number of chars, you include the image tag
So on.

Use CSS to define a box around your image. Then you can set the float of text as wrap / top-bottom etcetc. (check the css manual: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/)

Not sure wether this is the ideal solution, but it might help..?

webchef

I was actually thinking of something along those lines... Counting up the number of sentences based on "." or i can use the <br> tags i place in the text to seperate paragraphs.

and some articles don't have any pictures. So im gonna have to figure out a way to count the number of files in a folder rather than using mysql_num__rows().

thanks for the suggestions. I will look deeper into it.

Mike