Key Words to Links (Brainstorming)

sois

Hello All,

I want to be able to type something up in Microsoft Word and paste it into a text box for upload to my database. The thing is I want it to be able to automatically find key words and make them into links.

Here is my setup: I have a sports league. Every time I type a player's name, I want it to find his name and link. So there are about 700 possible "keywords".

How would you guys do this with so many key words? Thanks for the input.

bradgrafelman

An array of keywords => url and str_replace:

foreach($keywords as $word => $url)
    $data = str_replace($word, "<a href='$url'>$word</a>", $data);

sois

bradgrafelman wrote:
An array of keywords => url and str_replace:
foreach($keywords as $word => $url)
    $data = str_replace($word, "<a href='$url'>$word</a>", $data);

So should I have an array or 700 or so words? The list will only grow as players retire/new players come in. Is this efficient?

Also, one other thing i didn't mention. Like most sites that have sports articles, I don't want all instances of the word to have links. Just the first.

Notice this article:
http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news;_ylt=AqcqPODAcFx.EBtOMioLIc.B2bYF?slug=bengalshenry&prov=st&type=lgns

Chris Henry's name is shown more than once, yet there is only one link.

How does Yahoo do this? Do their writers write HTML? Thanks.

bradgrafelman

sois wrote:
Is this efficient?

shrug I'm not sure... if you did some caching and outputted the content as a static HTML, I'm sure it'd be fine. Do some benchmarking if you're worried about efficiency.

sois wrote:
Also, one other thing i didn't mention. Like most sites that have sports articles, I don't want all instances of the word to have links. Just the first.

Ah, yes, that would change things a bit. Try this:

foreach($keywords as $word => $url)
	if(($pos = strpos($data, $word)) !== FALSE)
		$data = substr_replace($data, "<a href='$url'>$word</a>", $pos, strlen($word));