How do I check for words that are too long?

Jsn7821

I have a posting system on my website, and people try to screw it up by posting things that stretch out the page.

How can I run a check and make sure that they dont enter words longer then, say 40 characters? It would have to perform some kind of check to see how many characters are in between each space...

OR: is there a way to do this is css? I would still be interested in knowing how to do it with php, though.

Jsn7821

ok, i found out about wordwrap() by searching the forum but it isn't exactly what I want.

The problem with that, say I limit the word wrap to 10:
IIIIIIIIII
WWWWWWWWWW

it could make things look funny. I need a way of either detecting that a long word was submitted (and having an error message), or automatically spacing out long words.

Lemonboi

Time for you to learn regular expressions

How to Use page, found good at the basics

Zend's basic idea of using expressions

Jsn7821

So I just spent some time learning about regular expressions, ha - its like a whole new language inside of php. I can't beleive I never learned about these.

So I found a code to change all [url]http://*[/url] into html links...

$text = ereg_replace("[a-zA-Z]+://([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*", "<a href=\"\0\">link</a>", $text);

I am guessing \0 is for the first ( ) group...

This code doesn't work for links that have question marks in them, such as http://example.com/example.php?page=index ... how could I change this script to work for that?

oh and what is [.]? for?

Jsn7821

$text = ereg_replace("^{www([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*",} "http://\0", $text);

I made this to go before the other one.