PCRE Problem

james2010

I'm trying to remove and replace tags that are accidently placed in my html tags using wordwrap(), so I've done up a little regular expression to search and replace, but I'm pretty new to regular expressions and I'm having some major problems with the syntax

here's what I've got (the syntax is sound but it's not doing what I want it to do)

  $string = $query['string'];
  $pattern = "((\[(.+?)<br>\](.+?)\[\/(.+?)\])|(\[<br>(.+?)\](.+?)\[\/(.+?)\])|(\[(.+?)\](.+?)\[\<br>/(.+?)\])";
  $pattern .= "|(\[(.+?)\](.+?)\[\<br>/(.+?)\])|(\[(.+?)\](.+?)\[\/<br>(.+?)\])|(\[(.+?)\](.+?)\[\/(.+?)\]<br>))";

  $string = preg_replace($pattern, "[$1]<br>$2[/$3]", $string);

Any ideas on how I can make this work? Thanks in advance.

stolzyboy

what are you going to replace the with and is it only that you are looking for

johnnyv

If you only need to remove all the tags and they are all lowercase then str_replace(" ","",$string) will do it. Though you may not want to get rid of all the tags.
If you have mixed case eregi_replace(" ","",$string) will do it though it is slow comparitively to string_replace. PHP5 will have case insensitive string_replace.

james2010

ok.... I'm parsing strings with tags, much like the one on this forum, which I've taken from a query.

for example - $query['string'] = '&#91url="www.google.com"]Google&#91/url] this is a test &#91b]bold text&#91/b]';

I'm then using wordwrap() to place after every 60 characters.

And then using preg_replace() to replace all instances of [tag]text[/tag] with their html equivalent.

but the problem is sometimes I end up with [ tag]text[/tag], which I don't want. So before I parse the string through the second preg_replace() I use preg_replace() to switch all the instances of [ tag][/tag] (or any other place that has been placed within the tag) with [tag] text[/tag] thus placing the formatted text on a new line without messing up my html tags or going over the maximum allowed number of characters. But I'm having trouble writing a regular expression that does this.

groundup

str_ireplace() is better than eregi ;D

xblue

to identify
[ tag] or
[t ag] or
[tag ]
you won't get far with str_replace.
should be possible with sth similar to this (it's not tested):

preg_replace("#[([^{]]) ([^]])]#i",} "[$1$2]", $str);

[ = opening square bracket, has to be escaped
([^]]*) = anything but closing square bracket, optionally
the rest should be fairly obvious

$1 and $2 are backreferences to what was matched within parentheses.

james2010

Thanks, I haven't tried it out yet, but it's given me a better idea as to how to go about doing this.😃