[ale] Need help with a regular expression please....

[Keith Morris]

Hi all!  I'm creating a specialized mini CMS in PHP that will store 
content in a MySQL database.  What I am trying to do is parse the 
content and replace certain keywords with a link.  The keywords and 
associated links are kept in a MySQL table.

Here is an example.

$keyword = "Widgets Technology Co.";
$location = "http://www.widgets.com/about";

$keyword2 = "Widgets";
$location2 = "http://www.widgets.com";



$content = "We have the best Widgets at Widgets Technology Co.";

I want to parse through $content looking for $keyword and replacing it
with:
$keyword  (this I can do with no problem)

but I am going to be looping through a series of keywords (phrases)
sorted by length (longest to shortest) that may or may not contain
other defined keywords such as the values above for $keyword2 which 
would cause nested links and other nonsense.

so what I'm needing is a regular expression that will find the
$keyword (phrase) that is not already between "<a href =" and "</a>"
so that it will not try to relink it.

so far, this is the regular expression that I have, but does not work
properly:

[^(^\<a href=)][^(\>)]($keyword)[^(a\>)$]

If there is a better way of doing this, I would appreciate any
insights.

Thanks.

Keith Morris


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