Quoting text in replies

radioliam

I'm trying to think of the best way to quote text in reply messages in a BBS similar to that of E-mail or Newsgroup applications. ex:

This is quoted text.
everything within this text was written
before me.

The answer's probably a simple one, and I'll probably have figured it out by the time someone replies to this, but in case I haven't or it isn't simple I thought you all might help.

The problem I'm forseeing is that in order to do so you need to count so many words or characters per line and then add a newline with the line quote identifier. So, let's say I'm using a textarea that has 10 cols - how many characters do I count before adding a newline? And what's the best way to do that? Split the lines into an array?

I did a search, just so you all know, through the archives and couldn't find anything quite like what I'm trying to figure out. Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

brandonschnell

if the text is doesn't need to be word wrapped use:

echo str_replace("\n","\n> ","> ".$text);

otherwise use:
$newtext = wordwrap( $text, 75 );
echo str_replace("\n","\n> ", "> " . $newtext);

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.str-replace.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.wordwrap.php

[deleted]

If you use a break-character in wordwrap() it will also be inserted at reguler linebreaks:
$a="hello\n I am a line that is waaay too long for what I need";
echo wordwrap($a,10,"\n> ");

Just remember that the beginning of the line is not a linebreak, so you have to print the break-character before you print the rest.

radioliam

Hey, Brandon.

Brandon Schnell wrote:

if the text is doesn't need to be word
wrapped use:

echo str_replace("\n","\n> ","> ".$text);

Unfortunately, it would need to.

otherwise use:
$newtext = wordwrap( $text, 75 );
echo str_replace("\n","\n> ", "> " .
$newtext);

That would be great, but the env I'm writing for, believe it or not, is 3.0.5! Sux I know, but I'm only one small part of this huge server it resides on and don't have the luxury of being able to change to another server. 🙁

Anyhow, I looked it up from the link you provided and it says this was a recent addition to PHP.

Any other ideas?

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.str-
replace.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.wordw
rap.php

Thanks for this, btw. Really is nice to be given the reference links.

Regards,

[deleted]

That sucks :-)

Then you are "doomed" to process the string bit by bit:

$string="hello\n I am a line\n\n that is waaay too long for what I need";

// Get the seperate lines
$aLines=explode("\n",$string);

$max_width=10;
$break_character="<br>\n> ";
// Process the lines
for ($t=0;$t<count($aLines);$t++)
{
// if the line is longer than what we want, process it.
// Otherwise, just print it
if (strlen($aLines[$t])>$max_width)
{
// A new line, so print the break character
echo $break_character;

	// The line is too long, chop it up into words
	$aWords=explode(' ',$aLines[$t]);

	$iLength=0;
	// Process all the words from this line
	for ($tt=0;$tt<count($aWords);$tt++)
	{
		// Does adding this word to the line make the line too long?
		if (($iLength + strlen($aWords[$tt])) >= $max_width)
		{
			// Yes, print the break character, reset the counter
			$iLength=0;
			echo $break_character;
		}
		// print the word, _plus a space to seperate the words, and add the length of the word to the line length
		echo $aWords[$tt].' ';

		// remember we also printed a space, so that must count in the length too!
		$iLength += strlen($aWords[$tt]) + 1;
	};
}
else
{
	echo $break_character.$aLines[$t];
};

};

radioliam

Actually - thanks! But I did a little more investigating on the PHP manual for the definition of wordwrap() in hopes of finding the core of how it worked. Good thing I did because I came across a post from another user with a link to a good alternative. Make sure to bookmark this - I think, from the looks of it, this works better than the PHP version of the same thing.

http://morannon.the-infinite.org/archive/php/word_wrap

Regards,

fandelem

i found this function somewhere and tweaked it a little, maybe this helps as well..

function wraplines($oldstr, $wrap)
{
// incoming: $oldstr is the string intended to be wordwrapped
// $wrap is how many lines (int value)
// returns a string, nicely wordwrapped

    # we expect the following things to be newlines:
    $oldstr=str_replace("<br>","\n",$oldstr);
    $oldstr=str_replace("<BR>","\n",$oldstr);
    $newstr = ""; $newline = "";
    # Add a temporarary linebreak at the end of the $oldstr.
    # We will use this to find the ending of the string.
    $oldstr .= "\n";
    do
    {
            # Use $i to point at the position of the next linebreak in $oldstr!
            # If a linebreak is encountered earlier than the wrap limit, put $i there.
            if (strpos($oldstr, "\n") <= $wrap)
            {
                    $i = strpos($oldstr, "\n");
            }
            # Otherwise, begin at the wrap limit, and then move backwards
            # until it finds a blank space where we can break the line.
            else
            {
                    $i = $wrap;
                    while (!ereg("[\n\t ]", substr($oldstr, $i, 1)) && $i > 0)
                    {
                            $i--;
                    }
            }
            # $i should now point at the position of the next linebreak in $oldstr!
            # Extract the new line from $oldstr, including the
            # linebreak/space at the end.
            $newline = substr($oldstr, 0, $i+1);
            # Turn the last char in the string (which is probably a blank
            # space) into a linebreak.
            if ($i!=0) $newline[$i] = "\n";
            # Decide whether it's time to stop:
            # Unless $oldstr is already empty, remove an amount of
            # characters equal to the length of $newstr. In other words,
            # remove the same chars that we extracted into $newline.
            if ($oldstr[0] != "")
            {
                    $oldstr = substr($oldstr, $i+1);
            }
            # Add $newline to $newstr.
            $newstr .= $newline;
            # If $oldstr has become empty now, quit. Otherwise, loop again.
    } while (strlen($oldstr) > 0);
    # Remove the temporary linebreak we added at the end of $oldstr.
    $newstr = substr($newstr, 0, -1);

return $newstr;
}

probably does the same thing as vincents, however.