Searching within SQL result and making specific words hyperlinks

jme

I'm not too sure if this is possible; but if it is it would save a lot of manual work.

Basically, a user will look at a item (no longer than 300 words) which is the result of a SQL query. What I want to do is create a function that will search this result for certain key words, and if it finds them make that word a hyperlink.

eg.

Word List:

bob    1
tim     2
james    3
sally    4   ....

Text (from SQL query):
One day bob met sally in the rain. Later on that day ....

What I then want to create ...

One day <a href="page.php?id=1">bob</a> met <a href="page.php?id=4">sally</a> in the rain. Later on that day ...

Any suggestions or pointers would be great. I'm not looking for an out-of-the-box solution, but if you could give me some ideas that would be brill!

Cheers 🙂

rincewind456

This will, hopefully point you in the right direction:

<?php
$text ="This is a story about Fred and Wilma. Fred was a right pain...";
$wordsearch = array('Fred', 'Wilma');
$wordreplace = array('<a href="page.php?id=1">Fred</a>', '<a href="page.php?id=2">Wilma</a>');
$text_replaced = str_replace($wordsearch,$wordreplace,$text);

echo $text_replaced;
?>

Also look at the str_ireplace() function

jme

That's excellent. Thank you. 🙂

Just one other thing, is it possible to make it so that it's not case sensitive -other than str_ireplace as this only runs on php5

eg. If the word in the word list is fred

it would also add links to Fred, FRED, FrEd etc ...

vaaaska

$wordsearch = array("/Fred/i","/Wilma/i");

You might need to switch from str_replace to preg_replace now though.

😉

rincewind456

str_ireplace() is the case insensitive way to do that.

jme

I couldn't use str_ireplace as I run php4 not 5 but someone had written a function to do the same thing on the php.net site.

Just one more thing... the script is picking up part words when I don't want it to. For example if the word was bob and the word bobsleigh then it would link the first three letters of bob - i need it to only link then the word bob is by it's self.

Any ideas? Thanks for all your help. 🙂

rincewind456

You could add a space to either end of the search and replace string like

" Fred " 
'<a href="page.php?id=1"> Fred </a>'

Weedpacket

Or to expand on vaaaska's suggestion:

 $wordsearch = array("/\bFred\b/i","/\bWilma\b/i");

jme

The script is working perfectly now.

Many thanks 🙂