Common Expression Help - Seeking all Guru

[eatfishy]

I was reading the regular expression tutorial on a few websites and I thought I understand it. When I try to code it out, I was not getting result that I needed. Below is a blog  and I want to search for certain phrase:

 

 

--------Start Blog-----------

 

If you wanna learn how I create this website, you can start by reading some of the material in the below link. This is how I got started on creating website. [weblink]www.htmlcodetutorial.com[/weblink] I can show you what I know.

 

--------End Blog-------------

 

I basically want to search for any phase like [weblink]www.htmlcodetutorial.com[/weblink] so that I can replace it with something like this <a href="www.htmlcodetutorial.com">www.htmlcodetutorial.com</a>. I tried a few expression and it's not working. I'm concern with searching the phrase and I'll get to the replacing epression part later.

 

$occurence=preg_match("|[weblink].[\/weblink]|", $blogcontent, $match);
echo $occurence;
echo $match[0];

 

www.htmlcodetutorial.com

[Mchl]

What does dot stand for in regular expression?

[eatfishy]

I thought . stands for wildcard.

 

[weblink]www.target.com[/weblink]

[weblink]www.google.com[/weblink]

[weblink]www.yahoo.com[/weblink]

 

I want to be able to use a reg expression to pick up any of the above phrases.

 

 

[Mchl]

It does, but for single character only

[eatfishy]

ah...is there a wild card for multi characters?

[Mchl]

There is, but it wouldn't work for you.

|[weblink][^[]*[\/weblink]|

should do the trick

 

Here's probably the best tutorial

http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html

[eatfishy]

Thanks, but it only returns weblink. Is there a way to return to the whole phrase?

 

ex: [weblink]www.google.com[/weblink]

[Mchl]

Duh... forum removed some slashes from the code...

 

<?php
$occurence=preg_match_all("|\[weblink]([^[]*)\[\/weblink]|", $blogcontent, $match);

 

you should have full matches in $match[0] and urls only in $match[1]

[eatfishy]

I tried the code and it didn't work. It was returning ARRAY as the value. I decided to take another route around this by creating a function with the help of string position, string length, string find and string replacement to get what I need.

 

Thanks again for the help.

[nrg_alpha]

Getting an array as a result is normal (with preg_match_all, the results will be stored into array index 0) like so:

 

$blogcontent = <<<EOF
--------Start Blog-----------

If you wanna learn how I create this website, you can start by reading some of the material in the below link. This is how I got started on creating website. [weblink]www.htmlcodetutorial.com[/weblink] I can show you what I know.
More text [weblink]www.htmlcodetutorial2.com[/weblink] followed by yet more text.

--------End Blog-------------
EOF;

preg_match_all('#\[weblink]([^[]*)\[/weblink]#', $blogcontent, $matches);
echo '<pre>'.print_r($matches[0], true); // this is the info you seek

 

I suppose you could always use a preg_replace callback to do the replacements:

 

Example:

$blogcontent = <<<EOF
--------Start Blog-----------

If you wanna learn how I create this website, you can start by reading some of the material in the below link. This is how I got started on creating website. [weblink]www.htmlcodetutorial.com[/weblink] I can show you what I know.
More text [weblink]www.htmlcodetutorial2.com[/weblink] followed by yet more text.

--------End Blog-------------
EOF;

function replacement($input){
    return $input[0] = "<a href=\"$input[1]\">$input[1]</a>";
}

$blogcontent = preg_replace_callback('#\[weblink]([^[]*)\[/weblink]#', 'replacement', $blogcontent);
echo $blogcontent;

 

If the weblink tags can be upper or lowercase, you can always throw an 'i' modifier after the closing delimiter to match it in any case (upper or lower).

 

 

[eatfishy]

I appreciate the help. I think I will use regular expression to validate email address for the register page.