PHP Extract Single String from List of Values - php

Question

I need some assistance with php. I have been trying several things for the past several days including str_replace to no avail.
I have a field that may contain from 1 to 20 values, all listed on their own line, there is no html code in that field to separate them and some of the values may have their own spaces in between, so separating by space doesnt work.
What I need is to extract every single string of each line and convert it to code.
<p>For example, my field with values looks like this: </p>
<p><b>lang_fld </b><br>
------
<br>
English<br>
Spanish<br>
German<br>
French</p>
What I have in mind is to extract each line, ex. "English" from that string, and create a line of code like
<img src="images/flags/english.png> English
Basically I want to add the flag graphic to the word
I already tried
echo str_replace('English','<img src="images/flags/english.png>,lang_fld)<br>
...and so on
what I get after going through every single possible value is a bunch error
messages (different every time since I keep making changes - by guessing)
Can someone offer an easier option to do this? Not all 20 values will be in
that areatext field, some may contain just one language, some ten, some all 20,
etc.
Thank you!

Answer 1

Assuming you have all the values on a separate line, you can do explode() on the string to convert it to array of separate items, then loop through the array with foreach and perform any modifications with the single item. After you are done with the items and you would like to get them back together, you can use implode() to combine them into a single string.
A short sample ( you can of course use a for loop, I just prefer foreach here as it shows you better what is happening with the data ):
$text =
"French language
Italian language
English language";
$items = explode( "\n", $text ); // Split by newline ( you can also use "<br>" as separator )
$result = array(); // Modified data will be placed here
foreach ( $items as $item )
{
// Do something with $item
$item = "<img src=\"images/flags/$item.png\"> $item";
$result[] = $item;
}
// Merge them back together
$text = implode("\n", $result);