Need help with string parsing

wavesurf

I need to make a function that parses through a string and changes the text in the string according to a number of set rules.

It is for use in a forum type application, and when a text is like this "..... testlink ...." i need to make a <a href=testlink>testlink</a>. This also needs to check further than the first occurence of the testlink string, since there might be more than one in the text.

I have been toying around with a lot of the string functions in PHP, but I can't seem to get it to work.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

ZibingsCoder

You're probably looking for something like this.

A small example...

<?php

   $string = $_POST['body'];

   $string = ereg_replace("[url-](.*)[/-url]", "<a href='/\\1'>/\\1</a>", $string);

?>

Keep in mind, this is a -very- basic example, and you should make a much better regex pattern than that, but you get the basic idea.

[note]
A little note, the /\1 things, are supposed to be \1

wavesurf

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried this:

<?
$testString ="Parse test: [turl]www.itavisen.no[/turl]";
echo "<p>";
echo $testString;
echo "</p>";

$string = ereg_replace("[turl-](.*)[/-turl]", "<a href='/\1'>/\1</a>", $testString); 	

echo "<p>Test: <br>";
echo $string;
echo "</p>";

Of course I changed the /\ to \, but it still didn't work. Take a look at www.itavisen.no/test/functions.php.

Any ideas why it doesn't work?

ZibingsCoder

Well, you should take out the "-" from the [turl] things, that was just cause I used "url", which is a BBCode here on the boards. 😉

wavesurf

OK, of course. But I tried that to, and it still didn't work. Take a look at it now at www.itavisen.no/test/functions.php

Now the code looks like this:

<?
$testString ="Parse test: [turl]www.itavisen.no[/turl]";
echo "<p>";
echo $testString;
echo "</p>";

$string = ereg_replace("[turl](.*)[/turl]", "<a href='/\1'>/\1</a>", $testString); 	

echo "<p>Test: <br>";
echo $string;
echo "</p>";

Any other mistakes I have done?

ZibingsCoder

Yeah...it's just a problem with the regex pattern. Like I said, it's probably wrong, and I think we've proven that now. I hate regex...but man is it godly...

Give me a few to keep trying with this, I'll get it, I swear!

ZibingsCoder

There are times in life when one feels utterly stupid. This has been one of those times for me.

Example of WORKING turl parsing...

<?php

$testString = "[turl]http://www.link.com/[/turl]";

echo ( "Before: {$testString}" );

$parsed = ereg_replace("\[turl\]([a-zA-Z0-9.:/]*)\[/turl\]", "<a href='\\1'>\\1</a>", $testString);

echo ( "<br><br>After: {$parsed}" );

?>

Yeah...I'm stupid sometimes, but that's my right as an American!

[follow up]
Starting to get pissy with this highlight_string stuff...

should be...

[turl] and [/turl]

as well as \1

wavesurf

That works, almost perfectly 🙂

Unfortunately, if I change the testlink in [turl]testlink[turl] from http://www.link.com to www.link.com it doesn't work anymore. Then it makes a local address out of it, just adding the link to the script path.

Take a look at this www.itavisen.no/test/functions.php.

Do you know why that is?

tsinka

Hi,

if there is no [url]http://[/url] in front of the href="..." the browser will handle that link as a link to another resource on your server.

To solve that check if [url]http://[/url] exists and add if not.

Thomas

yelvington

If you're trying to reinvent bbcode, why don't you use the PEAR class?

http://pear.php.net/package/HTML_BBCodeParser