Preg_replace Tag Replace Dashes With HTML Tag

0 Views

I am partially disabled. I write a LOT of wordpress posts in ‘text’ mode and to save typing I will use a shorthand for emphasis and strong tags. Eg. I’ll write -this- for <em>this</em>.

I want to add a function in wordpress to regex replace word(s) that have a pair of dashes with the appropriate html tag. For starters I’d like to replace -this- with <em>this</em>

Read More

Eg:

-this- becomes <em>this</em>

-this-. becomes <em>this</em>.

What I can’t figure out is how to replace the bounding chars. I want it to match the string, but then retain the chars immediately before and after. 

 $pattern = '/s-(.*?)-(s|.)/';
 $replacement = '<em>$1</em>';
 return preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $content);

…this does the ‘search’ OK, but it can’t get me the space or period after.

Edit: The reason for wanting a space as the beginning boundary and then a space OR a period OR a comma OR a semi-colon as the ending boundary is to prevent problems with truly hyphenated words.

So pseudocode:
1. find the space + string + (space or punctuation)
2. replace with space + open_htmltag + string + close_htmltag + whatever the next char is.

Ideas?

Post Views: 0

Related posts

Leave a Reply

3 comments

  1. a space as the beginning boundary and then a space OR a period OR a comma OR a semi-colon as the ending boundary

    You can try with capturing groups with <em>$1</em>$2 as substitution.

    [ ]-([^-]*)-([ .,;])

    DEMO

    sample code:

    $re =      "/-([^-]*)-([ .,;])/i";
$str = " -this-;n -this-.n -this- ";
$subst = '<em>$1</em>$2';

$result = preg_replace($re, $subst, $str);

    Note: Use single space instead of s that match any white space character [rntf ]

    Edited by o/p: Did not need opening space as delimiter. This is the winning answer.

    You can try with Positive Lookahead as well with only single capturing group.

    -([^-]*)-(?=[ .,;])

    substitution string: <em>$1</em>

    DEMO

  3. In the code below, the regex pattern will start at a hyphen and collect any non-hyphen characters until the next hyphen occurs. It then wraps the collected text in an em tag. The hyphens are discarded.

    Note: If you use a hyphen for its intended purposes, this may cause problems. You may want to devise an escape character for that.

      $str = "hello -world-. I am -radley-.";

  $replace = preg_replace('/-([^-]+?)-/', '<em>$1</em>', $str);

  echo $str; // no formatting
  echo '<br>';
  echo $replace; // formatting

    Result:

    hello -world-. I am -radley-.

hello <em>world</em>. I am <em>radley</em>.