Automatic Endnotes

python_q

I've been thinking about the site I'm about to design this winter, and something that I thought might be useful was a way to automatically add endnotes to articles on the site. The articles will actually be more like essays, so annotations would be useful. Readers would click on the number for the note and be taken to the note at the bottom of the page. I've seen similar setups on sites before, so I thought about ways to implement it.

The best way I've come up with so far is to replace code within the text of the article, let's say "[note]Here is a note[/note]", with a link to the note at the bottom and then the script would number the notes automatically.

Has anyone coded anything like this? What are some other possible, and faster, solutions?

Merve

HTML -- target links are the obvious solution.

python_q

I don't think I was clear enough. I'm pulling the articles from a MySQL database. I want the PHP to parse the articles and create notes automatically. Obviously I'll be using targets in the actually HTML.

python_q

Okay, here is basically the method I'm going to use, but I wonder if there might be a better way that can avoid using preg_match_all:

<?

$body = "This is body text [note]This is a note[/note].
More text and stuff goes here [note]And once again, there's a note[/note].\n";

$body_match = array();
$notes = array();
$notes_search = array();
$notes_replace = array();

preg_match_all('/\\[note\\](.+?)\\[\/note\\]/',$body, $body_match);

$notes = $body_match[1];

$note_str = "<br /><b>Notes:</b><br />\n";

for($i=0;$i<count($notes);$i++) {
	$cur = $i + 1;
	$notes_search[] = "[note]".$notes[$i]."[/note]";
	$notes_replace[] = "[<a href=\"#note_$cur\">$cur</a>]";
	$note_str .= "<a name=\"note_$cur\"></a><sup>$cur</sup>".$notes[$i]."<br />\n";
}

$output = str_replace($notes_search,$notes_replace,$body);
$output .= $note_str;

echo $output;


?>

python_q

I'm beginning to feel like I'm talking to myself. Anyway, I realized this afternoon that the code I posted last night won't work if two or more notes are the same. It will number both notes with the same number, which could get confusing. You might be saying, "Well just don't make two notes exactly the same?" However, since I'm sure "Ibid." will be making a few appearances, I need to be able to distinguish the notes. But I don't know how.

Is there any way to get str_replace to only look for one occurance of each string in an array? Or is there any other way for doing endnotes? Any help would be appreciated.