matching and replacing

jack_

I dunno why but i cant seem to figure this out, i'm wanting to match and then replace given strings in a string but allow certain occurences. for example;

In string1 i want to find:

sometext xname xname xname xname xname sometext xname xnamexname

I want to keep the first occurence of xname and sometext, and remove any following xnames.

In string2 i want to find:

yname yname yname yname yname sometext

And only keep the last occurence along with sometext.
Or just remove them to only keep one but not remove sometext.

It could be as simple as replacing the duplicates i dont want with nothing, ie "" or ''
I just cant seem to figure it out. Help is greatly appreciated.

mykg4orce

whats the purpose of this? can we see some of your code?

jack_

to explain further and a little less vaguely im working on some forums and i am attempting to limit infiinite quoting. This is the current checking:

	function quote_check($in)
	{
		$preg_begin = array();

	preg_match_all('#\[quote=(.+?)]#i', $in, $out, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

	if (!empty($out[0])) {
		foreach ($out[0] as $match)
		{
			$preg_begin[] = strpos($in, $match);
		}
	}

	$begin = $this->strpos_array($in, '[.quote.]');
	$begin = array_merge($begin, $preg_begin);
	sort($begin);

	$end = $this->strpos_array($in, '[./quote.]');

	if (count($begin) != count($end)) {
		return false;
	}

	foreach ($begin as $count => $pos)
	{
		if ($pos > $end[$count]) {
			return false; 
		}
	}
	return true;
}

Again i'm not sure how I should go about a loop in order to check for the occurences. I changed the quote lookup in the tag adding dots to break the bbcode from recognizing it. If someone wants to quote repeatedly it will show up as

person wrote:
person wrote:
person wrote:
sometext

Hope that helps, no this isn't some homework assignment. heh!

(we have an accurate example here of what I dont want :queasy: :quiet🙂

jack_

Also I'm not sure if it would matter for searching and replacing or not but i have changed the way the quote code prints addings a space before and after the brackets, if I need to explode I should be able to do it by ' '. Again, I'm pretty lost. 😕

jack_

Am I asking this question without clarifying enough? I dunno what else to do, I'm just at a loss, no one knows? Or am I confusing?

jack_

I'm an idiot and clearly needed to brush up on my expressions. Sorry for the thread guys. :S