Reformat search results

PHPSardine

Hello,

I have a script that allows a user to search one of my databases for information within a certain mysql field. Upon returning the results, I want to format the text so as to highlight the search term and only show about 10 words before and after the search term.

For example if the search term is "hello" and the searched field is:

"Hi I'm a dumb newbie posting on phpbuilder.net. You can tell this because I still start my posts with hello. That is a sure sign that I'm trying to get everyone to like me and respond to my post."

I would like it to return:

"...can tell this because I still start my posts with <span class="highlight">hello</span>. That is a sure sign that I'm trying to get..."

I've been able to replace the search term with the correct HTML using the following code:

$search_term = '/'.$term.'/';
$replacement = "<span class=\"highlight\">$term</span>";
$text = preg_replace($search_term, $replacement, $row['text']);

Can you help me then select the previous bit of text and the following bit of text? I understand that I probably cannot get whole words, but if that is possible I would be so happy...I would really learn a lot there!

Thanks so much!

etully

I wrote some code but I ran into a number of problems.

First, in your example, hello is followed by a period. Therefore, even if it's a match when you search the database, you have to use some logic to find it in the $text string.

So as I addressed that problem, I realized that (A) the search term could show up more than once in the $text string and you don't say what should happen in that case. (😎 If you search on a short string like "it", there is a strong likelihood that it will show up in the middle of words in the string and you may or may not want those to be highlighted.

When dealing with punctuation in the text string, like a period after the word hello, it's easy to ignore the punctuation... but then if you do that, then "hello" is the same as "he.llo" and I doubt that you want that to be a match.

Ugh. It seemed simple at first but it turns out that I don't have a simple answer.

PHPSardine

etully wrote:
Hmmm... that didn't work.

The bit of code I included was intended to just highlight the searched text. I may have copied it wrong, but seems to work for me. Note that the text being searched ($row['text']) will not work because I just copied that out of my code which refers to a field in an array returned from a database query.

Thanks for trying to help!