Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Programming Discussion : Highlight words (PHP)

[actionman]

hi,

I have a few ideas but i need something a lot better so please help.

I am trying to highlight all the words that match a given string.

for example.

i want something like this,
http://domain.com/highlight.php?url=...tring=blahblah

then it should search the yahoo.com's page and highlight all the "blahblah" words.

Any idea how should i do that or has it been coded before ?

thanks

[error404]

A clumsy and naive way of doing it would be:

PHP Code:

$new = preg_replace("/\b($word)\b/i", "<span class='highlight'>\1</span>", $string); 


This is probably a bad idea on any sort of marked-up text, as it'll clobber parameter names and such as well. You need a state machine to fix that.

[actionman]

thanks for the reply,

that's what i have in mind but how do you grab words from a given url and "highlight" them ?

[Dark Light]

Hello,

If you wanted to get the words from the url, such as 'highlight.php?highlight=word', you might try doing:

PHP Code:

$word = $_GET[highlight]; 


Put that before the preg_replace(); that error404 wrote.
You might want to do some checks on that as-well.

I hope that helps , if that's not you wanted, I apoligise,
- Dark Light.

[error404]

Note that the \1 in my code should be a double backslash (or $1 instead if you're using a non-archaic PHP version).