PHP - isolate first letter from a text - php

Question

I have a set of articles, in which I want to style the first letter from each article (with CSS).
the articles usually start with a paragrah, like:
<p> bla bla </p>
So how could I wrap the first letter from this text within a <span> tag ?

Answer 1

Unless you need to do something extremely fancy, there's also the :first-letter CSS selector.

Answer 2

<?php
$str = '<p> bla bla </p>';
$search = '_^<p> *([\w])(.+) *</p>$_i';
$replacement = '<p><span>$1</span>$2</p>';
$new = preg_replace( $search, $replacement, $str );
echo $new."\n";

Answer 3

You can do this in all CSS.
CSS supports "Pseudo-Elements" where you can choose the first letter / first word and format it differently from the rest of the document.
http://www.w3schools.com/CSS/CSS_pseudo_elements.asp
There's a compatibility chart; some of these may not work in IE 6
http://kimblim.dk/css-tests/selectors/

Answer 4

you could add a Php span but might not be as clean
$s = " la la ";
$strip = trim(strip_tags($s));
$t = explode(' ', $strip);
$first = $t[0];
// then replace first character with span around it
$replace = preg_replace('/^?/', '$1', $first);
// then replace the first time of that word in the string
$s = preg_replace('/'.$first.'/', $replace, $s, 1);
echo $s;
//not tested

Answer 5

I've not found a versatile method yet, but a traditional code implementation (that may be slower) works:
function pos_first_letter($haystack) {
$ret = false;
if (!empty($haystack)) {
$l = strlen($haystack);
$t = false;
for ($i=0; $i < $l; $i++) {
if (!$t && ($haystack[$i] == '<') ) $t = true;
elseif ($t && ($haystack[$i] == '>')) $t = false;
elseif (!$t && !ctype_space($haystack[$i])) {
$ret = $i;
break;
}
}
}
return $ret;
}
Then call:
$i = pos_first_letter( $your_string );
if ($i !== false) {
$output = substr($s, 0, $i);
$output .= '<span>' . substr($s, $i, 1) . '</span>';
$output .= substr($s, $i+1);
}