Regex to Find all &quote and replace with quote literal ONLY WHEN..

[BizLab]

Hey guys, long time. I'm using pseudo tags for markup within the documents of a wiki i am working on.

 

While a simple string replace has worked on the rendering of most items, i find myself a little lost with the "[link][/link]" tag set because it includes html entities and i need quote literals.

 

[*]I am cleaning strings with htmlentities()

[*]I am using str_replace to switch each part of the link attribute, one at a time - BUT i would prefer a solution to convert an entire link tag (with href, including attributes - AND the actual text that goes between the two anchor tags - which already exists) from my - link /link - syntax to the standard <a>content</a>

I need to:

// convert this
[link href="glossary.php?term=myterm"]My Term[/link]

// TO this
<a href="glossary.php?term=myterm">My Term</a>

 

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[.josh]

$string = "[link href="glossary.php?term=myterm"]My Term[/link]";
$string = html_entity_decode(preg_replace('~\[link([^\]]*)\](.*?)\[/link\]~i','<a$1>$2</a>',$string));

[BizLab]

$string = "[link href="glossary.php?term=myterm"]My Term[/link]";
$string = html_entity_decode(preg_replace('~\[link([^\]]*)\](.*?)\[/link\]~i','<a$1>$2</a>',$string));

 

Great progress! (my regex's are very very weak - obviously) The only thing that remains is to limit the html_entity_decode() to only the characters within the [link] tags because i don't want to convert every " in the entire text to " 

 

Sample case (non-sense text pulled from a random post)

$haystack = 'This pattern is a slight modification in pattern "submitted" by Jacek Sompel. 
Using this tag one can also match anchor tags not having [link href="glossary.php?term=atrophic"]atrophic[/link] in href. 
This is useful for web crawler for crawling all links in a web page.';

 

Intended final output (html - i inserted newlines to prevent horizontal scrolling on the post)

 

This pattern is a slight modification in pattern "submitted" by Jacek Sompel. 
Using this tag one can also match anchor tags not having <a href="glossary.php?term=atrophic">atrophic</a> in href. 
This is useful for web crawler for crawling all links in a web page.

 

Sorry for not being more specific in the original post - and THANKS AGAIN for the help!!

[.josh]

$string = "some random 'link' to [link href="glossary.php?term=myterm"]My Term[/link] blah "blah"";
$string = preg_replace('~\[link([^\]]*)\](.*?)\[/link\]~ie','html_entity_decode(\'<a$1>$2</a>\')',$string);

[BizLab]

Pure genius.  HUGEEE Thanks, i will look this over and try to learn a thing or two