Creating my own html tags...

[ender]

Hi,

I've been trying to create my own "html tags" for my website and was wondering if it is possible to search the page for [tag]some text[/tag], search a field in a mysql database for whatever was between the tags, and make that text a link. For example, the user at the site would type in:

[card]Card Title[/card]

and it would search my database for that card title and return:

<a href="cards.php?name=Card Title">Card Title</a>

The problems I'm having are in searching the page for the [tag] and [/tag], isolating whatever was between the tags, and replacing the tags with the html for the link.

Thanks and if anyone has any info on this it would be greatly appreciated.

~ender

[mhalloran]

I think this should do it but I haven't tested it. Hopefully a regEX wiz can look this over for you...

$html = preg_replace ( '/\[card\]([^\[]+)\[\/card\]/i', " <a href=\"cards.php?name=Card Title\">\\1</a> ", $html);

[ender]

Thanks for the advice. I put that in but it gave me a warning: Unknown modifier 'c'. This is the tiny page I threw the code in:

<?php

$html = preg_replace ( '/[card]([^[]+)[/card]/i', " <a href=\"cards.php?name=Card Title\">\1</a> ", $html);

echo "This is some sample text for the html of the page. Lets see if this works. Here is one now: [card]sample text[/card]. Then there will be some more text and the rest of the page...";

?>

Thanks and I will look more into preg_replace. Any further help would be greatly appreciated.

~ender

[bubblenut]

Escape all slashes except for the first and the last in the regex, PHPBB has an annoying habit of striping all the backslahes out.

[ender]

I escaped the slash on the [/card] and it got rid of the warning, but it doesn't replace the tags or anything, just simply prints what was in the echo.

~ender

[mhalloran]

You have to run the text through the regular expression

$html = "This is some sample text for the html of the page. Lets see if this works. Here is one now: [card]sample text[/card]. Then there will be some more text and the rest of the page..."; 

$html = preg_replace ( '/\[card\](.*?)\[\/card\]/i', " <a href=\"cards.php?name=Card Title\">\\1</a> ", $html); 

echo $html;

[ender]

Oh, ok. It is working now, but it displays a strange link when it finds the tags. Also, I was wondering what should go in the regex statement at the beginning. I noticed that originally it was([^[]+), and now it is (.*?). I'm not really sure what these are so I can't really mess around with anything, but they both yield different results, the second one with some more errors.

Anyway, here is the link to the page: http://www.mtgzone.com/cards/first_test.php. The file looks like:

<?php

$html = "here is the [card]sample card[/card].";

$html = preg_replace('/[card]([^[]+)[\/card]/i', " <a href=\"cards.php?name=Card Title\">\1</a> ", $html);

echo "$html";

?>

And the html output was:

here is the [ <a href="cards.php?name=Card Title"></a> [/ <a href="cards.php?name=Card Title"></a> ].

Also, I was wondering if there is an alternative way of doing this without setting the $html to be the text the preg_replace searches through. Ideally, I would like to set something up to simply run through the entire page and run this operation on every instance of the tag.

Thank you for the help.

~ender

[mhalloran]

I fixed the code in my last post and I've also tested it. It works well.

You can't really have a command to just parse the content unless you parse the page from a separate location. For example, you could have a page called hello.html and have a separate page called hello.php that would contain the code.

$filename = $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]."/hello.html";
$handle = fopen($filename, "r");
$contents = fread($handle, filesize($filename));
fclose($handle);
$contents = preg_replace('/[card]([^[]+)[/card]/i', " <a href=\"cards.php?name=Card Title\">1</a> ", $contents ); 
echo $contents;

Seems a little sloppy and if you're importing a PHP page it won't be parsed unless you use lynx or something. Maybe you should post the whole script so we can see why you can't just parse a single segment.

[ender]

Here is the html it is spitting out: http://www.mtgzone.com/cards/first_test.php.

For some reason it is still acting weird. I have:

$html = preg_replace ( '/card[/\card]/i', " <a href=\"cards.php?name=Card Title\">\1</a> ", $html);

Also, all of the main pages that I would be using this for pull the information from a specific table. Could I just set the $html to equal the field that the information is in of that table and run this?

Thanks,

~ender

[mhalloran]

Sorry, I'm sloppy today:

$html = preg_replace ( '/\[card\](.*?)\[\/card\]/i', " <a href=\"cards.php?name=Card Title\">\\1</a> ", $html);

You can put whatever variables you want in there. If you are reveiving this from a database row and the variable is named $row["table_data"], for example, you can just echo it out...

echo preg_replace ( '/\[card\](.*?)\[\/card\]/i', " <a href=\"cards.php?name=Card Title\">\\1</a> ", $row["table_data"]);

Actually, I'm not sloppy the people that coded this board are. It's been stripping the back slashes out of my code. cut and paste this one...

$html = preg_replace ( '/[card](.*?)[\/card]/i', " <a href=\"cards.php?name=Card Title\">\1</a> ", $html);

[ender]

Wow, perfect. That worked like a charm. I didn't know you needed to escape all the brackets.

I was wondering, though, if its possible to set the \1 to be a variable or something so I can do other things with it (like search a database to retrieve more information about it and print it out).

Thank you very much and I appreciate all the help.

~ender

[TheDefender]

Yeah, you can copy the \1 into the name portion of your URL, and it will use what it found between your [card][/card] brackets to defin the variable in the string...

$html = "This is some sample text for the html of the page. Lets see if this works. Here is one now: [card]sample text[/card]. Then there will be some more text and the rest of the page...";  

$html = preg_replace ( '/\[card\](.*?)\[\/card\]/i', " <a href=\"cards.php?name=\\1\">\\1</a> ", $html);
echo $html;

[Weedpacket]

Originally posted by ender
I was wondering, though, if its possible to set the \1 to be a variable or something so I can do other things with it (like search a database to retrieve more information about it and print it out).

You could look up [man]preg_replace_callback[/man], and there's also the /e modifier