[RESOLVED] Handling strings

ManWithNoName

I need to cut up different divisions of a string and put them in an array, e.g.

$string = ” I haven't committed a (b)crime(/b). What I did was fail to comply with the law.”;

Should become:

$string[0] = ‘I haven't committed a’;
$string[1] = ‘(b)crime(/b)’;
$string[2] = ‘. What I did was fail to comply with the law.’;

I can think of exploding the string with space as separator. Then use a foreach loop and sift through the array.

Another way would simply be to use RegEx (match and put in array).

Any other suggestions?

NogDog

Will there always be just one instance of "(b)text(/b)", or could there be multiples, or none?

roscor

instead of spaces, which would be difficult in a sentence could you use ,

$string = ” I haven't committed a ,(b)crime(/b), What I did was fail to comply with the law.”;
$stringArray= explode(",", $string);

ManWithNoName

Thanks for your response guys:

NogDog:
"Will there always be just one instance of "(b)text(/b)", or could there be multiples, or none?"

There could be one to several or none.

roscor: about using , (commas); interesting idea, but it would require the user to write the commas manually in the textarea, and if there were to be any other commas in the text, well...

Maybe I should have pointed this out: the idea is to create a "BB" style CMS (or whatever they are called). I'm using XML so I need to identify what is going to be a textNode and what is going to be an "ordinary" node (e.g. a bold node).

As far as I now you can't sentence a string to "DOM", so instead I need to separate the different string sections, and identify them one by one. And nothing else seem to come to mind except explode and/or RegEx...

NogDog

$parts = preg_split('#(\(b\).*?\(/b\))#i', $text, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);

ManWithNoName

That was great; really hit the spot. Thanks again NogDog -- especially for giving me the answer on a silver plate 😉

I promise to look more carefully in the PHP manual next time (I fell so stupid, I worked with that function a couple of days ago...)