[thelist] regular expression help

Bob Meetin ontheroad at frii.com
Sun Apr 1 12:05:50 CDT 2007


I'm back... I tested and can't seem to get it to work, so I created a 
test page in PHP.  The page is at www.dottedi.biz/codesamples/regex.php. 
On the page I display the code in plain text, then have a section to 
display the output.  I made up some dummy contents for the variable, 
$data. 

What this is for - I have some content management pages where clients 
can update some of their own content.  I'm trying to make it a little 
easier for them to do a few very simple functions such as include a URL 
without having to know HTML.  This is similar in concept to some of the 
bbcode stuff I've seen on a few message boards. 

BTW - I took a look at tinyMCE and some of the other text editors that 
were emailed out on another thread- it does some nice things and I found 
the manual helpful enough to be able to fairly painlessly add/remove 
formatting functions.  The ultimate goal is to be able to offer clients 
four or five different textarea formatting options depending on their 
comfort level (as well as limiting/controlling the content itself).

Another variation to bbcode which I also like is the one where you can 
highlight some text, select a formatting function and it inserts the 
bbcode into the textarea body.

Over, Bob

misterhaan wrote:
> how about this:
>
> if(preg_match('/(\{[^\}]\})(.+?)(\{\/[^\}]\})/', $data, $matches)) {
>   $contents = $matches[2];
>   $data = str_replace($matches[0], $matches[1] . $matches[3], $data);
> }
>
>
> that should pull out the contents into $contents and remove it from 
> $data, but keep the delimiters.  i didn't test it, and it will only do 
> it once so if you have more than one delimiter you'd need to loop 
> instead of using if, and probably store $contents a different way.
>   





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