Is it possible with php to make a string of, say, <a>-elements comma-separated?
The situation is that a foreach loop appends a number of <a> links to an $output variable one after the other:
$output = '<a>link</a><a>link</a><a>link</a><a>link</a><a>link</a>';
Is it afterwards possible in php to comma-separate them and achieve the below string?
$output = '<a>link</a>,<a>link</a>,<a>link</a>,<a>link</a>,<a>link</a>';
Or is the most efficient way to add the comma inside the foreach loop (and then to use an if-command to skip the last one, or something like that, since that will add one comma too many)?
$output = preg_replace("/a><a","/a>,<a",$output);
I'd argue that the array implode method is probably most common way to concatenate multiple elements like this, which has already been posted in another answer.
Depending on your situation, this might however not always be the case, so for the sake of completion I'd like to add that you can also use the rtrim function to easily remove any trailing commas when concatenating strings:
foreach($links as $link) {
$output .= '<a>link</a>,';
}
$output = rtrim($output, ',');
Documentation for rtrim can be read here
A simple replace might do the job for you:
preg_replace('/a><a/','a>,<a',$s);
In your foreach loop, rather than concatenating the item on to the end of an existing string, push them to an array:
$parts = array();
foreach($list as $item){
$parts[] = "<a>$item</a>";
}
Then, you can simply join (implode) the array elements together to get your desired result:
$output = implode(',', $parts);
there are 2 solutions
solution 1 (with str_replace()):
$output = '<a>link</a><a>link</a><a>link</a><a>link</a><a>link</a>';
echo str_replace("</a>","</a>,", $output);
Solution 2 (with explode and implode method):
$exploded = explode("</a>",$output);
echo implode("</a>,", $exploded);
Side Note: you can remove the last `"," by using rtrim() method
You can replace </a> with </a>,, then trim the last `,', check Demo
echo rtrim(str_replace("</a>","</a>,",$output),",");
Related
Due to bad DB design, there may be several values in a column # each row in a table. So I had to take in every string, check if commas exist (multiple values) & place each element into the end of an array.
Did try out functions like strpos, explode, array_push etc. With the folllowing code, how do i input ONLY the multiple elements into the end of an array, without creating another & placing that into an existing array?
$test = array();
$test = array ("testing");
$str = 'a,b,c,d';
$parts = explode(',', $str);
array_push ($test, $parts); //another array inserted into $test, which is not what I want
print_r($test);
Use array_merge.
$test = array_merge($test, $parts);
Example: http://3v4l.org/r7vaB
I have an array which I get from an exploded url (using $_GET).
The elements in the url are separated by commas but when I COUNT the elements the result includes the final comma. Eg: '?list=jonny,sally,bob,' returns '4' when '?list=jonny,sally,bob' returns '3'. I can't avoid the final comma as they are genrated with them automatically but I need to return 3 on both examples. Any ideas please?? Thanks
$list = explode(",", $_GET['list']);
$listCount = count($list);
//$listCount =(int)$listCount -1;
//$list[$listCount]=str_replace($list[$listCount],',','');
echo $listCount;
NB: the commented out lines are a failed attempt to remove the comma. But $list[$listCount] ,ie the final array element doesn't seem to exist even though it is counted
If you want to trim any extra commas at the start or end of the string, use trim(). If you want it at the end of the string, you can use rtrim().
$list = explode(",", $_GET['list']);
to
$list = explode(",", trim($_GET['list'], ','));
Trim any commas first:
$strList = rtrim($_GET['list'], ",")
$arrList = explode(",", $strList);
Array_filter will remove any empty values from your array, so in case you have two commas in a row, it will remove empty values caused by that also.
$list = array_filter(explode(",", $_GET['lists']));
i got a piece of code that so far returns me data like this when i use print $result;
ssl_card_number=41**********1111
ssl_exp_date=0213
ssl_amount=132.86
ssl_salestax=0.00
ssl_invoice_number=5351353519500
ssl_result=0
ssl_result_message=APPROVED
ssl_txn_id=00000000-0000-0000-0000-00000000000
ssl_approval_code=123456
ssl_cvv2_response=P
ssl_avs_response=X
ssl_account_balance=0.00
ssl_txn_time=11/21/2012 12:38:20 PM
thats from view page source.
and the page itself shows it as :
ssl_card_number=41**********1111 ssl_exp_date=0213 ssl_amount=132.86 ssl_salestax=0.00 ssl_invoice_number=8601353519473 ssl_result=0 ssl_result_message=APPROVED ssl_txn_id=00000000-0000-0000-0000-00000000000 ssl_approval_code=123456 ssl_cvv2_response=P ssl_avs_response=X ssl_account_balance=0.00 ssl_txn_time=11/21/2012 12:37:54 PM
i need to be able to handle each of the "keys" in a better way and dont know how to explode them maybe ?
One possible approach:
parse_str(preg_replace('#\s+(?=\w+=)#', '&', $result), $array);
var_dump($array);
Explanation: preg_replace will turn all the whitespace before the param names into '&' symbol - making this string similar to the regular GET request url. Then parse_str (the function created specifically for parsing such urls) will, well, parse this string (sent as the first param), making an associative array of it.
In fact, you don't even have to use preg_replace here, if each param=value string begins from a new line; str_replace("\n", '&') should do the trick.
An alternative approach:
$pairs = preg_split('#\s+(?=\w+=)#', $x);
foreach ($pairs as $pair) {
list ($key, $value) = explode('=', $pair, 2);
$array[$key] = $value;
}
Here you first create an array of 'key-value pair' strings, then split each element by =: the first part would be the key, the second - the value.
You can use the regular expression reported by #raina77ow or you could use explodes (riskier):
<?php
$tmps = explode("\n",$result); //this gives you each line separate
foreach($tmps as $tmp){
list($key,$value) = explode('=',$tmp,2);
echo $key.' has value '.$value."\n";
//you can even create vars with the "key" if you are sure that they key is a "clean" string:
$$key=$value;
//or put everything into an array - similar to the regexp
$result_array[$key] = $value;
}
?>
How can I prepend a string, say 'a' stored in the variable $x to each line of a multi-line string variable using PHP?
Can also use:
echo preg_replace('/^/m', $prefix, $string);
The / are delimiters. The ^ matches the beginning of a string. the m makes it multiline.
demo
There are many ways to achieve this.
One would be:
$multi_line_var = $x.str_replace("\n", "\n".$x, $multi_line_var);
Another would be:
$multi_line_var = explode("\n", $multi_line_var);
foreach($multi_line_var AS &$single_line_var) {
$single_line_var = $x.$single_line_var;
}
$multi_line_var = implode("\n", $multi_line_var);
Or as a deceitfully simple onliner:
$multi_line_var = $x.implode("\n".$x, explode("\n", $multi_line_var));
The second one is dreadfully wasteful compared to the first. It allocates memory for an array of strings. It runs over each array item and modifies it. And the glues the pieces back together.
But it can be useful if one concatenation is not the only alteration you're doing to those lines of text.
Because of your each line requirement, I would first split the string to an array using explode, then loop through the array and add text to the beginning of each line, and then turn the array back to a string using implode. As long as the number of lines is not very big, this can be a suitable solution.
Code sample:
$arr = explode("\n", $x);
foreach ($arr as $key => $value) {
$arr[$key] = 'a' . $arr[$key];
}
$x = implode("\n", $arr);
Example at: http://codepad.org/0WpJ41LE
I have some text inside $content var, like this:
$content = $page_data->post_content;
I need to slice the content somehow and extract the sentences, inserting each one inside it's own var.
Something like this:
$sentence1 = 'first sentence of the text';
$sentence2 = 'second sentence of the text';
and so on...
How can I do this?
PS
I am thinking of something like this, but I need somekind of loop for each sentence:
$match = null;
preg_match('/(.*?[?\.!]{1,3})/', $content, $match);
$sentence1 = $match[1];
$sentence2 = $match[2];
Ty:)
Do you need them in variables? Can't you use a array?
$sentence = explode(". ", $page_data->post_content);
EDIT:
If you need variables:
$allSentence = explode(". ", $page_data->post_content);
foreach($allSentence as $key => $val)
{
${"sentence". $key} = $val;
}
Assuming each sentence ends with full stop, you can use explode:
$content = $page_data->post_content;
$sentences = explode('.', $content);
Now your sentences can be accessed like:
echo $sentences[0]; // 1st sentence
echo $sentences[1]; // 2nd sentence
echo $sentences[2]; // 3rd sentence
// and so on
Note that you can count total sentences using count or sizeof:
echo count($sentences);
It is not a good idea to create a new variable for each sentence, imagine you might have long piece of text which would require to create that number of variables there by increasing memory usage. You can simply use array index $sentences[0], $sentences[1] and so on.
Assuming a sentence is delimited by terminating punctuation, optionally followed by a space, you can do the following to get the sentences in an array.
$sentences = preg_split('/[!?\.]\s?/', $content);
You may want to trim any additional spaces as well with
$sentences = array_map('trim', $sentences);
This way, $sentences[0] is the first, $sentences[1] is the second and so on. If you need to loop through them you can use foreach:
foreach($sentences as $sentence) {
// Do something with $sentence...
}
Don't use individually named variables like $sentence1, $sentence2 etc. Use an array.
$sentences = explode('.', $page_data->post_content);
This gives you an array of the "sentences" in the variable $page_data->post_content, where "sentences" really means sequences of characters between full stops. This logic will get tripped up wherever a full stop is used to mean something other than the end of a sentence (e.g. "Mr. Watson").
Edit: Of course, you can use more sophisticated logic to detect sentence boundaries, as you have suggested. You should still use an array, not create an unknown number of variables with numbers on the ends of their names.