[RESOLVED] Tiny problem

LiamBailey

Hi folks,

I am a happy little camper, I have recently set up a new website, I have done a content management system, when I put my articles into the database using a form, my homepage displays the five most recent posts in nice preview boxes and links go to www.mysite.com/thesectionname/the-title-split-with-dashes.

On the action page of my CMS form, after I have ran the INSERT query I create a php file using fopen and fwrite, after assigning the whole html page with the form variables in the correct place to one variable using .= the whole way down the page.

I name the file by spltting the title and inserting hyphens using a while loop like so:

$splitname = split(" ",$title);
$counttitle = count($splitname);
$f = 0; while ($f < $counttitle) { $filename .= $splitname[$f]; $filename .= "-"; $f++;};
$smalltitle = strtolower($filename);
$fintitle = substr($smalltitle,0,-1);

I use the same code to create the link on my homepage preview box and it was all working great. Until I used the title Facebook Fall: Beginning of the End?

My file didn't create, error messages, but it had been inserted into the DB, and the link on my front page preview box now went to facebook-fall:-beginning-of-the-end?.php

what a nightmare.

Is there anyway I can check if any of my elements in the split arrays are not letters and act accordingly?

LiamBailey

I thought maybe a regex could do it but I have always been terrified of them.

I went and read up on ereg and I am still terrified, php manual is filled with examples but no explanations and I see ereg(<[/adl'>928..//['jj//@>)

It looks like a lod of gibberish, and i only need a simple one, so I had a go but I dont think it is right, if someone can just tell me where my ereg syntax is wrong that'll be great.

$splitname = split(" ",$title);
$counttitle = count($splitname);
$f = 0; while ($f < $counttitle) { $worker = substr($splitname[$f],-1); if (!eregi("a-z0-9",$worker) { $splitname[$f] = substr($worker,-2,1) } $filename .= $splitname[$f]; $filename .= "-"; $f++;};
$smalltitle = strtolower($filename);
$fintitle = substr($smalltitle,0,-1);

with the code above I am hoping to cut the last charachter off the end of a splitarray element if it is anything but a letter or number. I would have rather just replaced -- : ? or ! with "" (i.e. deleted the characters) with ereg_replace but that was even more terrifying.

Please help

LiamBailey

Hi Guys,

I got it, I am proud I managed to do it myself.

I wonder why no one replied though, have I done something wrong like left a thread and not marked it resolved or something?

If I have please let me know and i'll search all night if I have to and mark it resolved.

I just got a new computer and all my recent threads are in my old inbox.

Here is the site that ended up helping me solve my problem:

http://php-regex.blogspot.com/search/label/Regular%20Expressions

laserlight

I wonder why no one replied though, have I done something wrong like left a thread and not marked it resolved or something?

People who read a question might not know how to answer it, and then not all questions get read by those who know how to answer them.

In this case I think that regex is unnecessary. You should be able to use [man]urlencode/man or [man]rawurlencode/man instead, replacing both the splitting and the regex.

LiamBailey

Honestly?

urlencode will make my title lower case, remove any non-text/numerical characters and make the spaces hyphens?

God if it does I wish I'd known about it 4 days ago.

laserlight

urlencode will make my title lower case, remove any non-text/numerical characters and make the spaces hyphens?

No, but it will allow the titles to be used as-is in the URLs.

If you still want to have a "lower case, remove any non-text/numerical characters and make the spaces hyphens" format, you might want to post your current solution and only resolve the thread if no one is able to improve on it.