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

[David Corbin]

Keith Morris wrote:

> 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\>)$] 

This expression is no-where near what you want.  You should look into 
zero-length lookahead/behind patterns.  But regardless, I don't think 
you're going to find a reasonable RegEx for handling this.

David

>


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