[thelist] Complicated PHP Search and Replace

[danieleastwell at onetel.net.uk]

Hi,

This is my first time posting - I've been struggling with this
problem all day and haven't really come that close to
resolving it, I'm hoping you can all help.

I'm developing a rudimentary content management system that
tags up content with non-standard tags, for example,

<link> http://web address here <linktext> link text here </link>

for a link, and

<bullet>bullet items here</bullet>

for unordered lists.

I've worked out the simple str_replace for the <link> tags to
create working hyperlinks on pseudo tags pulled from the
database to the viewed HTML, but am struggling with the coding
of the unordered lists.

I have this psuedo-code so far, that operates on the content
after having converted the <bullet> tags to conventional
<ul><li> opening and closing tags (only at the beginning and
end of an unordered list):

go through $content and for every <ul>, find <li>,  then,
until you find </li>, find \n and replace with </li>\n<li>

and have given it this structure:

for($i=0 ; $i == strlen($content); $i++){ // all of the content
        for( ; ;){ // every <ul>
            if(){ // there is a <li>
                for( ;;){ // until there is a </li>
                    $content = str_replace("\n",
"</li>\n<li>", $content);
                }
            }    
        }
    }   

The problem comes with the coding. The iteration over the
content does not seem to work, and I can't get my head round
the correct way of thinking in order to operate a string
function on a substring, only from a particular starting
point/needle.

Any advice would be gratefully received.

Regards,

Dan Eastwell.