text between tags

RussellEngland

I'm using GTranslate which works great with plain text but sometimes raises errors with html tags - so I'd like to extract the text between > and <, translate it and replace the original text.

I've written the following code which uses strpos but would like a more elegant method with dom or preg_match but not sure how?

<?php
require("GTranslate.php");
$gt = new Gtranslate;

$english = "<tag>hello world</tag><tag2>hello again</tag2>";
echo "English: " . htmlentities($english) . "<br />";

$pos = strpos($english, ">");
$italian = "";

while ($pos>0) {
  // Add the html tag to the Italian string
  $italian .= substr($english,0,$pos+1);

  // Remove tag from English string
  $english = substr($english,$pos+1);

  // Look for end tag
  $pos = strpos($english,"<");

  // Translate text in between > and <
  $trans = substr($english,0,$pos);
  if (!empty( $trans)) {
    // Translate and add to Italian
    $trans = $gt->en_to_it($trans);
  }
  $italian .= $trans;

  // reduce English again
  $english = substr($english,$pos);

  // Look for next starting tag
  $pos = strpos($english,">");
}
// Any remainding english text
$italian .= $english;

echo "Italian: " . htmlentities($italian) . "<br />";
?>

nrg_alpha

Well, here is what I use to manipulate info between > and <

Example (replace the letter a with an asterisk only between > and <):

$str = 'This is a <a href="#">tag</a> test!';

function translate($a){
	return str_replace('a', '*', $a[0]);
}
$str = preg_replace_callback('#>[^<]+<#', 'translate', $str);
echo $str; // Output: This is a <a href="#">t*g</a> test!

So perhaps something along those lines could help you kickstart things? I'm not sure if regex is the best way to go with this, as DOM might be better, but I'm not sure how I would approach this otherwise.

RussellEngland

Almost got it with

$gt = new GTranslate;
$lang_pair = "it_to_en";

$italian = "<tag>ciao mondo</tag><tag2>ciao di nuovo</tag2>";

function translate($a){
  global $gt;
  global $lang_pair;
  $result = str_replace($a[0], $gt->$lang_pair($a[0]), $a[0]);
  return $result;
}
$english = preg_replace_callback('#>[^<]+<#', 'translate', $italian); 

echo "English: " . htmlentities($english) . "<br />"; 
// English: <tag&gt; hello world &lt;/tag><tag2&gt; hello again &lt;/tag2>

It looks like the > and < are being included in the regular expression. Do you know how to exclude them? other than using substr()

RussellEngland

Got it working with substr() and looks like I will need to use substr() anyway because gtranslate trims trailing spaces. Thank you for your quick repply 😃

function translate($a){
  global $gt;
  global $lang_pair;
  $original = $a[0];
  // Translate with out > and <
  $trans = substr($original,1,strlen($original)-2);
  $leftspace = "";
  if (substr($trans,0,1)==" ") {
    $leftspace = " ";
  }
  $rightspace = "";
  if (substr($trans,strlen($trans),1)==" ") {
    $rightspace = " ";
  }
  $trans = ">" . $leftspace . $gt->$lang_pair($trans) . $rightspace . " <";
  $result = str_replace($original, $trans, $original);
  return $result;
}

nrg_alpha

Another way in dealing with > and < is to apply a trim function that targets those characters (by listing > and < as trim's second parameter), do your translations, then append > back to the beginning and < to the end.

In either case, I'm glad it worked out for you.