smiley filter

[jdavila28]

I'm trying to create a smiley filter. been working on it for 2 hours now and frustrated. can anyone give me any pointers. here is how my stuff works.

user inputs a message into a text input form.

form is processed by script, and all the input is assigned to $message.

example: "hello everyone. i am posting picture.gif !!! This is fun" is submitted by form.

the variable $message now holds the above in quotations.

what i need to do is

open directory /images/
read the directory, and make a list or array of every picture.gif contained in that directory.

create some kind of foreach or for loop, that goes through $message and checks every word in the string, and if it matches any of the pictures.gif in the array containing the valid images, then replaces the specific word in $message , such as picture.gif , with <img src=/images/$picture.gif>

any ideas? ive been close a few times. but it just lead to frustration.

[jdavila28]

also ahead of time. the reason for this is so that

1.) i dont have to manually type a million of these
$mes = str_replace('alien.gif', '<img src="http://myurl.com/i/alien.gif">', $mes);

2.)smilies can be dynamically uploaded to the directory later on and code doesnt have to constantly be added to keep the filter up to date if icons are added or removed. so far i have managed to get this to work, it opens the directory, and lists the names of all the file names. I just dont know how to go from here and make it push each of these $file names into an array or string, and then make a function that checks all the words in the input string against valid gif $files and replace them.

here is the part i have got working that opens the dir and reads all the files and displays a ton of file.gif

$dirPath = "$root/i/";
$mycounter=0;
if ($handle = opendir($dirPath)) {

// keep reading the directory entries 'til the end
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {

// just skip the reference to current and parent directory
if ($file != "." && $file != "..") {
if (is_dir("$dirPath/$file")) {
// found a directory, do something with it?
echo "[$file]<br>";
} else {
// found an ordinary file
$mycounter++;
echo "<img src=\"http://www.myurl.com/i/$file\"> - $file<br><br>";
}}}
closedir($handle);
}