adding link values around each string - php

Question

I have a php value coming back from my database as a string, like
"this, that, another, another"
And I'm trying to wrap a separate link around each of those strings, but I can't seem to get it to work. I've tried a for loop, but since it's just a string of information and not an array of information that doesn't really work. Is there a way to wrap a unique link around each value in my string?

Answer 1

The easiest way that I see to do this would be using PHP's explode() function. You'll find that it will become very useful as you start to use PHP more and more, so do check out its documentation page. It allows you to split a string up into an array given a certain separator. In your case, this would be ,. So to split the string:
$string = 'this, that, another, another 2';
$parts = explode(', ', $string);
Then use a foreach (again, check the documentation) to iterate through each of the parts and make them into a link:
foreach($parts as $part) {
echo '' . $part . "\n";
}
However, you can do this with a for loop. Strings can be accessed like arrays, so you can implement a parser pattern to parse the string, extract the parts, and create the links.
// Initialize some vars that we'll need
$str = "this, that, another, another";
$output = ""; // final output
$buffer = ""; // buffer to hold current part
// Iterate over each character
for($i = 0; $i < strlen($str); $i++) {
// If the character is our separator
if($str[$i] === ',') {
// We've reached the end of this part, so add it to our output
$output .= '' . trim($buffer) . "\n";
// clear it so we can start storing the next part
$buffer = "";
// and skip to the next character
continue;
}
// Otherwise, add the character to the buffer for the current part
$buffer .= $str[$i];
}
echo $output;
(Codepad Demo)

Answer 2

A better way is to do it like this
$string = "this, that, another, another";
$ex_string = explode(",",$string);
foreach($ex_string AS $item)
{
echo "<a href='#'>".$item."</a><br />";
}

Answer 3

First explode the string to get the individual words in an array. Then add the hyperlinks to the words and finally implode them.
$string = "this, that, another, another";
$words = explode(",", $string);
$words[0] = $words[0]
$words[1] = $words[1]
..
$string = implode(",", $words);
You can also use the for loop to assign hyperlinks that follow a pattern like this:
for ($i=0; $i<count($words); $i++) {
//assign URL for each word as its name or index
}