Extract text from tags multiple times

[beary]

Hi,

If I have this:

Today is a good day
[LINK]Johnny is good[/LINK]
Tomorrow will be better
[LINK]Mary is bad[/LINK]
Who cares

And there could be anywhere between 0 and 4 occurrences of the [LINK]...some text...[/LINK] tags, how can I extract the strings

"Johnny is good" and "Mary is bad" ?

Really nice would be to have these stored in an array, such as

$myarray=array( 1=>'Johnny is good',2=>'Mary is bad');

Any pointers or ideas? Many thanks!

[Markus]

You'll almost certainly need to use a regular expression. Check out preg_match(), this code snipper on BBCode (very much like what you're doing) and also check out the 3rd parameter of preg_match() - it will store matches into an array for you.

[beary]

Hey there Markus,

As usual, you've been a superb help, and I really appreciate it! My actual problem was to take

Today is a good day
[LINK]Johnny is good[/LINK]
Tomorrow will be better
[LINK]Mary is bad[/LINK]
Who cares

and then match each of the strings inside the link tags to a record in mysql, in order to grab the actual path to that file, so I could then create the url instead of the links tags.

So now, after looking at the pages you suggested, I have

function bbcode_html($input) {
$bbcode = array(
'/\[link=(.+?)\](.+?)\[\/link\]/i'
);

$html = array(
'<a href="$1">$2</a>'
);
return preg_replace($bbcode, $html, $input);

So, if I run a query to find my magical pathway, such as

echo bbcode_html('Today is a good day<br>
[LINK=myfirstpath]Johnny is good[/LINK]<br>
Tomorrow will be better<br>
[LINK=mynextpath]Mary is bad[/LINK]<br>
Who cares');

it will now return the html

Today is a good day
<a href='myfirstpa th'>Johnny is good</a>
Tomorrow will be better
<a href='mynextpat h'>Mary is bad</a>
Who cares

Which is perfect.

And I can now easily extend to using [web] tags or similar for simple url web links. It needed to be so a user could simply place tags around a web link and have it create the url for them.

I think I better get my head around regular expressions. They seem pretty powerful. Again, thanks for the advice.

Cheers

You'll almost certainly need to use a regular expression. Check out preg_match(), this code snipper on BBCode (very much like what you're doing) and also check out the 3rd parameter of preg_match() - it will store matches into an array for you.

[Dormilich]

'/\[link=(.+?)\](.+?)\[\/link\]/i'

note: you actually need not stick with / as RegEx delimiter, every char will do as long as it doesn't have a special meaning. so you can skip some of the escapes (well, your case it's only one, but there may be times it comes in handy). e.g.

'@\[link=(.+?)\](.+?)\[/link\]@i'