Is there a way that I can convert these strings into HTML tags and vice versa?
example:
$str = 'The^ff0000 quick brown^000000 fox jumps over the lazy dog.'
the output must be
The<span style="color:#ff0000;"> quick brown</span> fox jumps over the lazy dog.
something like that and vice versa
If you are only talking about a few specific codes, you could use:
$str = "The^ff0000 quick brown^000000 fox jumps over the lazy dog.";
$str = str_replace('^ff0000', '<span style="color:#ff0000;">', $str);
$str = str_replace('^000000', '</span>', $str);
or if you prefer:
$str = "The^ff0000 quick brown^000000 fox jumps over the lazy dog.";
$str = str_replace(array('^ff0000', '^000000'), array('<span style="color:#ff0000;">', '</span>'), $str);
If you wish to allow any number of color codes, you might do:
$str = str_replace('^000000', '</span>', $str);
$str = preg_replace('@\^([a-f\d]{6})@i', '<span style="color:#$1;">', $str);
For a conversion back (if you are not using any other </span>'s), it could be:
$str = str_replace('</span>', '^000000', $str);
$str = preg_replace('@<span style="color:#([a-fA-F\d]{6});">@', '^$1', $str);
Note that this assumes you are typing the <span> exactly as above, without variability in whitespace.
$str = str_replace('</span>', '^000000', $str); $str = preg_replace('@\<span style="color:#([a-f\d]{6});">@i', '^$1', $str);<span style="color:#ffffff;text-align:center;font-weight:bold;etc..."></span>... it doesn't convert
;"> from the preg_replace. If you get too complicated in your needs, you may need to go to some kind of HTML parser since regular expressions (as I am using) are not at all ideal for parsing HTML, especially if you want to handle all of the edge cases.Sure it is a simple string replace if the ^(non-000000) value always represents an opening span tag with the hex value being the color style and a ^000000 always means a closing span tag.
This is a good example in which you should implement a Decorator patern (ex: make a static method and process the string using explode for instance and append the spans)
Since you have no actual closing tag, and would like ^000000 to represent the span closing tag, I'll expand on Mike's answer below.
$string = "The^ff0000 quick brown^000000 fox jumps over the lazy dog.";
// replace '^000000' first so we don't get false positives in the regex
$new_string = str_replace('^000000', '</span>', $string);
$new_string = preg_replace('/\^([0-9a-fA-F]+)\b/i', '<span style="color: #$1;">', $new_string);
