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So let's say I make a search on my website for "Tales of an Ancient Empire". My database is doing a full text search, and results come up. I have this function for the highlight thngy

function sublinhamos($text, $words) {

    // explode the phrase in words
    $wordsArray = explode(' ', $words); 

    // loop all searched words
    foreach($wordsArray as $word) {
        //highlight
        $text = str_ireplace($word, "<span class=\"highlight\">".strtoupper($word)."</span>", $text, $count);
    } 
    //right trows results
    return $text;
}

It's not too bad, but the problem here is because the seach terms is "Tales of an Ancient Empire", when the str_ireplace finds the already inserted SPAN's it encounters the "an" words from the search term, and break the SPAN tag.

I need the highlight to highlight parts of a word, and all words up to two characters minimum, but it's all good apart from the old SPAN encounter problem.

Any ideas please?

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4 Answers 4

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5

Well, to start I wouldn't use a span.

<mark></mark>

is the better element to use. It's purpose is for highlighting parts of text like this. See this article for more information.

Also, you can pass an array into str_replace, eg:

function sublinhamos($text, $words) {
    $wordsArray = array();
    $markedWords = array();
    // explode the phrase in words
    $wordsArray = explode(' ', $words); 

    foreach ($wordsArray as $k => $word) {
      $markedWords[$k]='<mark>'.$word.'</mark>';
    }

    $text = str_ireplace($wordsArray, $markedWords, $text);

    //right trows results
    return $text;
}
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7 Comments

@mishu he just noticed that. His solution is to not replace in a loop but with an array at once. I like it. +1
Well just tested it and strange enough having a result (created for testing) with the word mark on it, and searching for mark did not corrupted the output... So probably this is the answer to go...
Very nice, I just came across another issue, although nothing to do with @Nick answer. Take again the example "Tales Of An Ancient Empire" The word Ancient will be marked the first An, and the rest of the word will be kept unhighlighted... I imagine this is a whole new problem... Anyway accepted answer.. Thanks
You could order the wordsarray by size (biggest first) before the foreach loop. This should do it.
@Flo @Nick I found that sorting the order of the array works well for me. Made quite a few tests and almost all of them are good. Only found one bug Where you search for "Ma Mark". Where it breaks the <mark>. Although i don't see such a search being done ;) lol
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1

You could instead replace it with a temporary string that will no be searched (eg. {{{ and }}}) like this:

$text = str_ireplace($word, "{{{".strtoupper($word)."}}}", $text, $count);

After marking all your hits you can just do a simple replace of the temporary strings to your span tags

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0

You can use a preg_replace with negative look-behind instead:

$text = preg_replace('/(?<!<sp)(?<!<\/sp)(an)/i', '<span class="highlight">$1</span>', $text);

The first look-behind is for starting span tags and the second for ending tags. Possibly you can combine them into one, but not sure.

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have you tried something like this?

$text = preg_replace("|($word)|", "<span class=\"highlight\">".strtoupper($word)."</span>", $text, $count);
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