Link each word of string WITHOUT linking <br> - php

Question

I'm using a PHP script to link each word of the string:
<?
$str = "hello<br> guys good man";
$arr = explode(' ', $str);
foreach($arr as $value){
echo ''.$value.'';
}
?>
How do I link each word of the string $str without linking the <br>s?

Answer 1

You can just use preg_replace
// More complext string
$str = "hello<br> guys good man Google <br /> hurry";
// Url Template
$template = '%1$s';
// Replace Words
echo preg_replace("/(?!(?:[^<]+>|[^>]+<\/a>))\b([a-z]+)\b/is", sprintf($template, "\\1"), $str);
Output
hello
<br>
guys
good
man
Google
<br />
hurry

Answer 2

Use the strip_tags() function before/in your explode:
$arr = explode (' ', strip_tags($str));

Answer 3

Untested, but start with JvO's code and put the links back into the original string:
$str = "hello<br> guys good man";
$arr = explode (' ', strip_tags($str));
foreach($arr as $value) {
$link = ''.$value.'';
$str = str_replace($value, $link, $str);
}
echo $str;
Note that you can save time by removing duplicates from $arr.
Edit: in fact, you must remove duplicates from $arr, or things will get ugly:
$arr = array_unique(explode (' ', strip_tags($str)));
... and another edit to the original code for an error.

Answer 4

Before you form the link, process the string first:
$proc_val = preg_replace('/<br>/', '', $value);
echo ''.$value.'';

Answer 5

Not sure what you were saying in the comment of Jvo's answer, but you can always use the striptags in the foreach as well and only strip the link part.
foreach($arr as $value){
echo ''.$value.'';
}
So here is the full code:
<?
$str = "hello<br> guys good man";
$arr = explode(' ', $str);
foreach($arr as $value){
echo ''.$value.'';
}
?>
You really should think about what explode(' ', $str) is going to do though.
Any time any HTML tag has attributes to it like <span style="color: red;"> you are going to run into trouble. You should strip_tags first, on the entire string, then process it. Keep an HTML version as a separate string if you need to add stuff later.

Answer 6

Why not just explode the string as you currently are and simply strip the tags in the URL.
$str = "hello<br> guys good man";
$arr = explode(' ', $str);
foreach($arr as $value){
echo ''.$value.'';
}
This will output the following HTML which is what I believe you want.
hello<br>
guys
good
man

Answer 7

If the string is quite long, and can contain any number of tags, including <p>, <h1> and <br> as well as the more correct <br/>, you could consider parsing the lot, and use str_replace:
$string = 'Foo<br/>Hello Bar!';
$DOM = new DOMDocument;
//make sure all breaks are preceded by a space, if not words might be concatenated by accident
$DOM->loadHTML(str_replace('<br', ' <br', $string));
//get all nodes
$nodes = $DOM->getElementsByTagName('*');
//get the text, split it and replace, but keep track of replaced words
$replaced = array();
for ($i = 0, $j = $nodes->length; $i<$j;$i++)
{
$words = explode(' ',$nodes->item($i)->nodeValue);
while($word = array_shift($words))
{
if (!array_key_exists($word, $replaced))
{//avoid replacing twice (and thus creating a link within a link)
$replaced[$word] = true;
$string = str_replace($word, ''.$word.'', $string);
}
}
}
This code is tested and working.