PHP: Split header into spans - php

Question

I have a simple content rotator that displays text like so:
<h4><span>Featured Article</span></h4>
<h2><span>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,</span> <span>consectetur adipisicing elit</span></h2>
<span class="author">by Cameron Drysdale</span>
As you can see the h2 has it's text split up into <span> tags. This is so I can achieve the following effect as seen here on the pink box: http://www.paperviewmagazine.com/
The problem is how to do this automatically as the header will be generated from a database and will not have the span tags by default. Any ideas on how I could use PHP to add in some tags to wrap certain parts of a title?
EDIT: I'm using WordPress and so the title would be shown like <?php the_title(); ?> and I'd probably want to split the text after x number of characters
EDIT2: I should note that the idea is to split the content using span tags so this could also be a possibility: <span>this is</span> <span>some text</span> <span>I'm sharing</span>

Answer 1

What is the criteria you use for splitting.
Assuming it's a comma (you could use number of words/letters etc), just split the string using
<? $arr= explode(",",$your_db_field);?>
<span><?=$arr[0]?></span><span><?=$arr[1]?></span>

Answer 2

Or if you haven't already designed the db, simply have two fields - title_line_1 and title_line_2. No need to split.

Answer 3

If your text has <br/> tags or \n you can split it in array and then iterate over it.
$lines = split('<br/>',$text);
foreach($lines as $line){
echo "<span>".$line."</span>";
}
of course you can also use the comma to split the text.
to split the text by char length btw. you can use this.
$lenght = 100;
$start = 0;
$lines = array();
while(strlen($text) < $start)) {
$lines[] = substr($text, $start, $start+$length);
$start += $length;
}

Answer 4

A few questions: Why is your content broken into two sections when your example shows that they are the same font? is there always going to be a comma followed by a line break?
Reason I ask is because you could simply insert your title into an array and explode() on the comma.
EDIT: I'm using WordPress and so the
title would be shown like and I'd probably want
to split the text after x number of
characters
Okay that makes more sense. As far as I'm aware, there's no need for you to use multiple tags:
<?php
$chars_per_line = 15;
$title = "This is my title and I hope you like my article";
$title_length = strlen($title);
$lines = ceil($title_length / $chars_per_line);
for ($i=0; $i<$lines; $i++) {
$pos_start = $i * 15;
$pos_end = $pos_start + ($chars_per_line - 1);
echo substr($title, $pos_start, $pos_end) . '<br />';
}
?>

Answer 5

You do not need a span to achive the wanted result. You could just encapsulate you h2 in a div with a fixed width and the content will automatically flow on two line if it's to long.
Just make sure if you use this technique to you non-breaking space ( ) as spaces between the last words to avoid orphans.
I you really want to break it on specific chars, I would then go with Mr. Zen's answer
Edit:
Here is a link to a valid demo http://jsfiddle.net/38srk/3/
Edit (again):
I still think that a full html/css solution is still the best, but if you really want to do it in PHP here is a beginning for your solution :
$str = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit';
$words = explode(' ', $str);
$nbWords = count($words);
$nbWordsPerLine = 4;
$output = '<span>';
for($i = 0; $i < $nbWords; $i++) {
if($i % $nbWordsPerLine == 0
&& $i > 0
) {
$output .= '</span><span>';
}
$output .= $words[$i];
if ($i + 1 < $nbWords){
$output .= ' ';
}
}
$output .= '</span>';
echo $output;
This will give you something like that :
<span>Lorem ipsum dolor sit </span><span>amet, consectetur adipisicing elit </span>