search highlighting on fixed html

ThE_AlieN

I'm making a search on a site with highlighting of keywords. I've gotten it to work on dynamic data (from a MySQL-database), but I need it to work on fixed html pages too (or fixed html in a php-file).

The problem here is, if any of the html tags contains one of the search words, in part or as a whole, then these are highlighted too and this results in visible parts of html-tags when the page is viewed after the words are highlighted.

Anyone have any ideas on how to highlight searchwords in fixed html without touching the html-tags ? 😕

sid

if you work with a temporary variable ($tempHtml) and perform a strip_tags($tempHtml); on that, this should give you some ways to work around that issue.

daveyboy

 
/* read source file in */
$DATAFILE = 'input_file.html';
$fp = fopen( $DATAFILE, 'r' );
$DATA = fread($fp, filesize($DATAFILE));
fclose( $fp );

/* Replace all occurances of $SEARCH_QUERY within > ... < tags (not HTML elements). */
$pattern = "/(>[^<]*)($SEARCH_QUERY)([^<]*<)/Ui";
$replacement = "\\1<span style='background-color: yellow'>\\2</span>\\3";
$DATA = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $DATA);
echo $DATA;

nemonoman

I had the same problem:

here's my solution:


//$string contains html tags
//$search_words is an array
//this function highlights the search words found in the text, but doesn't affect the html tags
function highlight_search($search_words,$string,$bgcolor='yellow')
{
    $rawstrings = preg_split('#(<\/?)(\w+)([^>]*>)#mis', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

//this seperates the text from the html tags
//text is stored as elements of 'rawstrings'
    foreach($search_words as $search_word)
    {
         foreach($rawstrings as $rawstring){
            $test=eregi_replace("($search_word)",'<span style="background-color: '.$bgcolor.'">\\1</span>', $rawstring);

//if you find the searchtext in the rawstring, store both rawstring and highlighted string
 if($test<>$rawstring){$targetstrings[]=$rawstring; $highlightstrings[]=$test;}
         }

}
$count=count($targetstrings);
$i=0;
while($i<$count){

//now search the original tagged string, replacing the 
unhighlighted text with the highlight tagged text
        $string=str_replace($targetstrings[$i],$highlightstrings[$i], $string);
        $i++;
    }
     return $string;
}

ThE_AlieN

Thanks a million guys, both suggestions worked like a charm.
I haven't decided which one of the two I'm going to use though. 😉