Having trouble parsing a string

vargur

Hi all.

I am a newcomer to these forums, as well as to php coding, so please bear with me if the question sounds dumb or is inappropriate for this forum 🙂

I am having been messing around with regular expressions trying to parse as string in such a way that I add a hyperlink reference into it to resemble functionality often found in forums and for example in wiki tools.

What I want to do is take $originalString and turn it into $finalString. I have tried all kinds of things, but have been coming up short. If anyone out there can nudge me in the right direction I would be really thankful.

$originalString = "This is the [[link]] I am looking for";

$finalString = "This is the <a href='link'>link</a> I am looking for";

Houdini

You could try this.

$originalString = "This is the [[link]] I am looking for";
$test =preg_replace("#\[\[(.+?)]{2} .+?#is","<a href = '\$1'>\$1</a>",$originalString);
echo $test;

This works fine for me evidently I misunderstood what it is you are trying to do, I figured you wanted the stuff between the [[whatever]] to be the link, perhaps you didn't even run it or it is not what you want. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

vargur

Thank you so much Houdini! Works like a charm.

Can you tell me how I have to change it to make it work for multiple links, for example in a string such as this one:

$string = "Some text [[link1]], and some more text [[link2]], and yet more text [[link3]]".

When I add more links to the original one it stops working properly. It does for the first link, but not for the subsequent ones.

Best regards,
vargur

vargur

Houdini wrote:
This works fine for me evidently I misunderstood what it is you are trying to do, I figured you wanted the stuff between the [[whatever]] to be the link, perhaps you didn't even run it or it is not what you want. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

No - you are right, that is exactly what I was looking for. I want the [[whatever]] to be transformed into <a href='whatever'>whatever</a>

I am having these problems with adding links to the string though. I am trying to decipher your string to attempt to understand what is going on 🙂

Houdini

It will work the same anythin inside the [[ and ]] will be parsed and then replaced with that as a link in the final result. See PHP : preg_replace What the regex looks for is two [s escaped with the backslash then looks for anything after it the (.+?) then looks for ] and the {2} tells it two of those characters then a space and then the rest. Of course right now I am not looking at the regex but just do a Google search on Regex tutorials and you will see how a regular expression is built to do what you want.

vargur

Again my thanks Houdini.