Can PHP format text on the fly like this?

ezinestein

Hi,

I have no idea how nuts this will sound because I know virtually zero about PHP. But, there is something I would like to do and the program that does it is written in PHP.

It’s Wordpress. And WordPress provides the ability to let you post to your blog by email. It will go to your email account and grab the text that is in the messages. It also already sets the subject of the email as the title of the blog post. And is does a few other things.

But I need something done that it doesn’t do.

Example:

If my email inbox contains a message that looks EXACTLY like this...

MEDIA Invitation - Experts at McGill to examine solutions
Canada NewsWire (press release)
MONTREAL, April 7 /CNW Telbec/ - Experts agree - society is facing
an obesity epidemic. Solutions, however are around the corner ...
<http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/07/c3056.html>

CHILDHOOD Is New Battleground Against Obesity And Diabetes
Queens Chronicle - Rego Park,NY,USA
"The current epidemic in obesity is partly due to the rise of our push
button society. Increasingly, we have sedentary jobs and ...
<http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1861&dept_id=152368>

This Message was brought to you by email.

Remove this message:
http://www.domain.com/ab/remove?s=540c373a3ccd03a9&hl=en

Look for a related message:

http://www.domain.com/rvs/message?hl=en

Okay... right now when Wordpress goes and gets this message, it takes it and posts it to my blog exactly as above.

What I would like is to somehow format parts of the message on the way in.

I would like the message to look like this once it’s posted to the blog by Wordpress.

MEDIA Invitation - Experts at McGill to examine solutions
-- Canada NewsWire (press release) –
MONTREAL, April 7 /CNW Telbec/ - Experts agree – society is facing
an obesity epidemic. Solutions, however are around the corner ...
http://www.newswire.ca...

CHILDHOOD Is New Battleground Against Obesity And Diabetes
-- Queens Chronicle - Rego Park,NY,USA --
"The current epidemic in obesity is partly due to the rise of our push
button society. Increasingly, we have sedentary jobs and ...

http://www.zwire.com...

Here are the differences:

The first line of each paragraph is bolded.
The second line of each paragraph is now contained in dashes (--)
The hyperlinks are truncated to only the domain
And everthing below and including the line "This Message was brought to you by email." is removed.

There is already a WordPress Plugin that will truncate hyperlinks on your blog pages after the email has arrived. But there is nothing that will format the incoming text in the manner above.

Does any think that PHP could format this text on the way in from the email before it is posted to the blog?

Or perhaps even another solution using PHP?

If this is possible I would like to hire someone to set it up for me. I hope it’s possible.

Thanks for any help with this!!!

Kindly,
John

bretticus

It's possible, the php script that handles this is called wp-mail.php (your post was intrigueing enough for me to download it real quick and look.) On the other hand, the programmer woudl have to match the '---------------------------------------------------------- ' lines (assumming this is all coming from one source and are uniformly formatted.) Not sure I'm willing to do it but it is possible to answer your question.

ezinestein

Thanks for the input! It's funny... I said exact... but I meant every thing except the long dashed lines. 😃 Those I put in just to surround the example email.

Kindly,
John

PS - Your are right about wpmail.php... that's the script. Are you saying that you believe that it could be modified to provide the formatting I'm looking for?

bpat1434

Out of curiosity: Can you send the html tags or WP tags through the email?

This would save you coding problems.

~Brett

bretticus

Are you saying that you believe that it could be modified to provide the formatting I'm looking for?

Well, since you have access to the file source, anything's possible (prob not too difficult.) I just don't wanna delve into it right now, since to delve into it, would be (for me) to do it and I don't have the time. If anyone else wants to gander at it, ezinestein may pay you for it.

BTW, do you have the ability to just change the email body? Or does the email come from an external source. If you can modify it, you could skip the coding as Brett (hey that's my name!) says.

32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition.

BTW...I Relinquish the title: 'Super Geek' to LordShryku 😃