My string is to contain some "hotkeys" of the form [hotkey]. For example:
"This is a sample string [red] [h1]"
When I process this string with a php function, I'd like function to output the original string as follows;
<font color='red'><h1>This is a sample string</h1></font>
I'd like to use this function purely for convenience purposes easing some typing. I may use a font tag or div or whatever, let's not get into that. The point is this; a hotkey will cause the original string to be wrapped into
<something here>original string<and something there>
So the function first needs to determine if there are any hotkeys or not. That's easy; just check to see if there is any existence of [
Then we will need to process the string to determine which hotkeys exist and get into the biz logic as to which wrappers to be deployed.
and finally we will have to clean the original string from the hotkeys and return the results back.
My question is if there is a regex that would make this happen more effectively then the following parsing method that I am planning of implementing the function as.
step 1 explode the string into an array using the [ delimiter
step 2 go thru each array element to see if the closing ] is present and it forms one of the defined hotkeys, and if so, do the necessary.
Obviously, this method is not using any regex power. I'm wondering if regex could be of help here. Or, any better way to do it you may suggest?
If [ and ] are the only delimeters you need to worry about, you could probably use strtok
I don't speak english well but I saw your example :
"This is a sample string [red] [h1]"
<font color='red'><h1>This is a sample string</h1></font>
If I were you :
$red = substr( $chaine, strpos($chaine, '['), strpos($chaine, ']') );