Making 'The XXXX' into 'XXXX, The'

[bpops]

I want to change the format of titles of books and movies automatically from things such as

 

'A Book' and 'The Movie'

 

to

 

'Book, A' and 'Movie, The'

 

Currently, I'm trying something like

 

$var = 'The Movie';

if (strpos($var,'The') == 0){
  $var = substr_replace($var,'',0,strlen($var)-4).', The';
}

 

This works for 'The Movie' but if I give it anything at all, it still executs what's inside the if(). This is because if it finds The at the beginning, strpos returns 0, and if it doesn't find it at all, it still returns 0!

 

Any ideas -- a fix for this code, or a better solution alltogether?

[kenrbnsn]

Are you always taking the first word of the string or only under certain circumstances?

 

Ken

[bpops]

Only if it's "A", "The", or "An" (think the words that are ignored in general when alphabetizing something).

[bpops]

I figured it out..

 

if (strpos($var,'The') === 0)

 

checks that these are the same type, too, so while it's true that FALSE == 0, it's NOT true that FALSE ===0..

 

my head exploded.

[kenrbnsn]

Here's another solution. See if you can use it:

<?php
$tst = array('The Word','A Movie','Another Movie','An Animal','The Worst Movie Ever');
$wrds = array('the','a','an');
$new = array();
foreach($tst as $str) {
	$tmp = explode(' ',$str,2);
	if (in_array(strtolower($tmp[0]),$wrds))
		$new[] = implode(', ',array_reverse($tmp));
	else
		$new[] = $str;
}
echo '<pre>' . print_r($new,true) . '</pre>';
?>

 

Ken

 

[bpops]

That's a much cleaner method. I'll try this out, thanks Ken!