[RESOLVED] quote=(user) BBCode Help

unlucky17

Hey guys.

So, here's a tough one. I am writing a bit of custom BBcode and trying to figure out how I can make a

username wrote:
turn into something that looks like this:

username said:

....(whatever quoted).

The

, and whatever else are easy enough.. just simple string replacements, but I wrote some code to pass in the user being quoted via db lookups before realizing it doesn't work if multiple quotes from different users are in the same body of text.

Any ideas that are relatively lightweight? My best idea right now is to do a preg_match looking for "[quote=" and then use an if statement to do the replacements appropriately. The biggest problem is getting rid of the ] at the end of the line I want to replace without it looking for every instance of when there is a ] in the body of text.

unlucky17

Oh, and I also just realized that if I use preg_match I'd probably have to escape the [, due to it being a character used for patterns, right? Damn, this is confusing and I spent most of the day screwing up before realizing my mistake.

NogDog

You could use a [man]PCRE[/man] regular expression function with a sub-pattern for the user info within the tag.

Ultimately, a better approach might be the [man]bbcode[/man] extension if available or else the PEAR HTML_BBCodeParser package, as they will likely do a better job of dealing with things like multiple nested tags.

unlucky17

NogDog;10924043 wrote:
Ultimately, a better approach might be the [man]bbcode[/man] extension if available or else the PEAR HTML_BBCodeParser package, as they will likely do a better job of dealing with things like multiple nested tags.

Where would you put these files? In your site's root directory or somewhere else on the server? I only have access to my own site's files.

NogDog

The bbcode extension is available as a set of built-in PHP functions if the extension is installed on your server. The PEAR functions would be available if your server has PEAR installed and either has that package installed or you install it yourself. Alternatively, you can download the PEAR code yourself and install the file(s) wherever you want, but you'll also have to do the same with any other PEAR packages which are required for this one to work. (It's a lot simpler if you have PEAR already installed. 🙂 )

Typically your web host will have some sort of info page telling you what PHP extensions and/or PEAR modules are installed. If not, you can find out by simply seeing what happens if you try to access them:

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 1);

// test bbcode:
?><p><?php
echo (function_exists('bbcode_create')) ? "bbcode installed" : "no bbcode :(";
?></p><?php
// test PEAR
$path = get_include_path();
if(preg_match('#pear#i', $path))
{
    echo "<p>Looks like PEAR is installed.</p>";
    require_once 'HTML/BBCodeParser.php'; // this will puke if not installed
    echo "<p>Looks like BBCodeParser is installed.</p>";
}
else
{
    echo "<p>Looks like no PEAR :(</p>";
}

unlucky17

Cool, thanks. I'll check it out.

unlucky17

Well, looks like it failed both of those tests.

Contacted my host and they said they can't install PHP extensions.

Awesome! This is just peachy. :mad:

I guess the alternative is to use the way I've been doing it but change the order in which it replaces strings, and do the quoting last. Getting rid of the last ] from

user wrote:
is going to be problematic if a user tries to insert another ] somewhere else in their message.. it'll catch it and convert it to whatever I specify everywhere else in the document, so it might turn out to be a disaster.

I could also remove the ability to add a =user to the quote tag, but then it won't be very useful to just have 'quote' if a source isn't included.

There's no way to have it just grab the

user wrote:
and save "user" into a variable, to replace later? If there was, that would be optimal but so far I've never seen a function that can do it. Exploding the string would be a mess because you can't tell it to just explode once, and then putting it back together would all be a mess, too.

Groan.

NogDog

There are certainly ways, I just thought we'd first see if a "better" way was available. There are probably other 3rd-party scripts/classes out there you could use if you wanted. But let's look at a preg_replace() option:

<?php
$text = <<<END
This is a test. [quote=NogDog]Here is some text
quoted from a post by NogDog.
The end.[/quote]
This is the end of the test.
END;

$output = preg_replace(
   '#\[quote(=([^\]]*))](.*?)\[/quote\]#is',
   "<blockquote><strong>$2 said:</strong><br />$3</blockquote>",
   $text
);

echo $output;

Weedpacket

You can install PEAR on your own machine, have it install the bbcode parser, find the library/libraries it downloaded, and copy them to your site in the same relative position to each other that PEAR installed them. (The only reason for the local installation is so that it can handle all the dependencies; all you actually care about is the final result.)

unlucky17

Whoa, Nogdog.. I didn't even know you could do that. That's exactly what I've wanted to do.

What's with the >>>END and END in the text, some kind of delimiter? And how do you set up $2 and $3 like that?

Is there good tutorial for using regex that you can reccomend? I've never seen the #, ? and * symbols you used in that pattern, and most regex tutorials I read are either too easy (only tell you one regular expression and expect you to know everything) or too hard (they don't go into detail about all of the symbols they are using in their patterns).

I was just using str_replace for the other BBcode and it was doing the job up to this point.

NogDog

The "END" stuff is part of using [man]heredoc[/man] syntax for delimiting a string literal.

When you use the preg_*() functions, the string that matches the pattern is assigned to variable $0. Each sub-pattern, which is delimited by parentheses within the pattern, is assigned to $1, $2, etc. in the order in which it is encountered in the pattern.

unlucky17

Oh, also, that pattern does not work for nested quotes. I suppose I could break up the second part of it and have it replace those later.

unlucky17

NogDog;10924261 wrote:
When you use the preg_*() functions, the string that matches the pattern is assigned to variable $0. Each sub-pattern, which is delimited by parentheses within the pattern, is assigned to $1, $2, etc. in the order in which it is encountered in the pattern.

Cool! I never knew that.