[RESOLVED] how to count spaces between words and replace

VisionsOfCody

I'm trying to write a thing to replace any number of spaces between two words with a of the equivalent width - though obviously a lot depends on the font etc.

the user types words into a big textarea and uses the space bar to position them on a line

the text is then sent to the php page that searches through for spaces and replaces them

at the moment I've got this

$str = $_SESSION['txt'];
$str = str_replace("\r", "<br§/>", $str);
$str = str_replace(' ', '<span§style="padding-left:3em">', $str);
$str = str_replace(' ', '<span§style="padding-left:2.5em">', $str);
$str = str_replace(' ', '<span§style="padding-left:2em">', $str);
$str = str_replace(' ', '<span§style="padding-left:1.5em">', $str);
$str = str_replace(' ', '<span§style="padding-left:1em">', $str);
$str = str_replace(' ', '<span§style="padding-left:0.5em">', $str);
$str = str_replace("§", " ", $str);
echo $str;

the problem with this is that if there are 30 spaces between two words then it will replace them with

so there must be a simple way of counting the spaces between words and replacing with a span with padding-left that is the number of spaces * 0.5

here's the whole code :

<? session_start();
$_SESSION['txt'] = $_POST['txt'];
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>

<style type="text/css">

body{
	font-family:Arial, Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
	font-size:1em;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<form action="test-spaces.php" method="post">
<textarea name="txt" style="width:700px;height:300px;font-family:Arial, Georgia, Times, serif;font-size:1em;"><? echo $_SESSION['txt']; ?></textarea><br />
<input type="submit" name="_SEND" value="send" />
</form>
<? 
$str = $_SESSION['txt'];
$str = str_replace("\r", "<br§/>", $str);
$str = str_replace('      ', '<span§style="padding-left:3em"></span>', $str);
$str = str_replace('     ', '<span§style="padding-left:2.5em"></span>', $str);
$str = str_replace('    ', '<span§style="padding-left:2em"></span>', $str);
$str = str_replace('   ', '<span§style="padding-left:1.5em"></span>', $str);
$str = str_replace('  ', '<span§style="padding-left:1em"></span>', $str);
$str = str_replace(' ', '<span§style="padding-left:0.5em"></span>', $str);
$str = str_replace("§", " ", $str);
echo $str; 
?>
</body>
</html>

has anyone got any ideas how i can do this ?

thanks

bogu

Cant u use htmlspecialchars? this will replace any space between words with html caracter " " and for "\r\n" u may use nl2br

rincewind456

You could use [man]substr_count/man to count the number of occurances of the space then use that to generate your spacing value.

bogu

rincewind456 wrote:
You could use [man]substr_count/man to count the number of occurances of the space then use that to generate your spacing value.

I dont think substr_count is going to help here ...

VisionsOfCody

bogu wrote:
Cant u use htmlspecialchars? this will replace any space between words with html caracter " " and for "\r\n" u may use nl2br

probably

I'll have to check it out

I don't really like the idea of having huge chunks of " " - that sort of goes against my css-loving soul

but it certainly sounds like a simple solution and one that will stand up well to font-resizing

thanks for your suggestions