Omit (remove) printed tables if certain text found

[David_Nelson]

Hi guys,

I have a script that gathers results from an API and prints them in tables, sometimes though, it yields crazy results and I'd like to be able to have an area of my script where it specifies IF it finds something from my list of phrases/words THEN delete the table / omit it from results. The only tricky part of this script, I think, is that it has to do this after it gathers API results, but before it prints them to the user. Here is an excerpt from my code, where it is told to print the results from my API XML:

	}else{

    	li.innerHTML = '<div align="center"><table height="20" width=300><tr><td width=17><div align=right><img src=play16.png border=0></div></td><td><div align="left"><a onclick="ShowContent(\'box23\'); return true;" href="'+url+'" target="I1" ><b>'+entry.title.$t+'</div></b></a></td></tr></table></div>';

So you can see that it would need to check '+entry.title.$t+' to see if there are any of the phrases/words that I don't want it to print, before it shows the user the results.

The things that people will draw from the API are limited so it won't take me long to go through and make a list of phrases that come up in +entry.title.$t+' that I know people will not want to see.

Let me know if you need any clarification, I know this may be hard to understand what I'm getting at. :-)

Thanks

David Nelson

[sneakyimp]

It would be easier to check the value of entry.title.$t BEFORE you generate the html rather than trying to 'remove it' afterwards. This looks like javascript you have there.

perhaps you could write a function to check entry.title.$t before you assign anything to li.innerHTML? then you get something like this:

function checkFirst(str) {
  // this function would check str against your list of banned phrases...easiest way is probably defining an array of banned phrases and looping through them
  // returns true if the string is ok
}
if (checkFirst(entry.title.$t)) {
    li.innerHTML = '<div align="center"><table height="20" width=300><tr><td width=17><div align=right><img src=play16.png border=0></div></td><td><div align="left"><a onclick="ShowContent(\'box23\'); return true;" href="'+url+'" target="I1" ><b>'+entry.title.$t+'</div></b></a></td></tr></table></div>';
}

[David_Nelson]

Hey thanks for the reply,

That sounds good. Could you point me in the right direction of building that banned phrases array? I'm 15 yrs old and I just started getting the basics of php programming here recently so I'm a little rusty. 😉

Thanks!

[sneakyimp]

Well you should first learn the distinction between PHP and Javascript. The code snip you showed looks like Javascript but has variables:

}else{

li.innerHTML = '<div align="center"><table height="20" width=300><tr><td width=17><div align=right><img src=play16.png border=0></div></td><td><div align="left"><a onclick="ShowContent(\'box23\'); return true;" href="'+url+'" target="I1" ><b>'+entry.title.$t+'</div></b></a></td></tr></table></div>';

the $t appears to refer to some php variable so it would appear that you have a php script that is generating some Javascript. It's sort of hard to tell what's going on.

If you want to build an array of banned words in Javascript, it would probably look something like this:

var bannedWords = new Array('fark', 'sh!t', 'goddammit', 'george bush');

If you want a javascript function that checks a given string against that list, you'll probably need something like this:

var bannedWords = new Array('fark', 'sh!t', 'goddammit', 'george bush');
function wordIsOK(str) {
    for(var i=0; i<bannedWords.length; i++) {
        if (str.indexOf(bannedWords[i]) != -1) return false;
    }
    return true;
}