I've been playing around, trying to add abbr's to an html page. Whilst the following was working fine...

PHP Code:

$buffer = str_replace("UK", "United Kingdom", $buffer); 


...it falls apart when the abbreviation is within an html tag like href.

I'm therefore assuming this needs to be done with a regex. Can anyone suggest how?

Thanks.

there is a " missing after UK

Thanks. That was a typo, but the real problem still exists.

http://us.php.net/ereg_replace
http://us.php.net/preg_replace
I personally use ereg.
I'm not sure what you mean by if falls apart, do you mean you want it to cleanse the HTML tags, or do you want it to stay out of HTML tags?

Basically, imagine the following...

PHP Code:

$buffer = "<p>This is the UK.</p>";
$buffer = str_replace("UK", "<abbr title='United Kingdom'>UK</abbr>", $buffer);  
//Prints <p>This is the <abbr title='United Kingdom'>UK</abbr>.</p> 


That's fine.

But now imagine this...

PHP Code:

$buffer = "<a href="X" title="UK Homepage">Link text</a>";
$buffer = str_replace("UK", "<abbr title='United Kingdom'>UK</abbr>", $buffer);  
//Prints <a  href="X" title="<abbr title='United Kingdom'>UK</abbr>" Homepge">Link Text</a> 


So rather than doing a replace on all text, the replace should exclude html tags.

(Note: Searching for a solution, I realised that asked about this before but couldn't get a solution).

OK the only thing I can think of is take an array of all characters and build an if/for loop where if the array[] character == '<' go into a for loop until you hit a '>'. Quite system intensive and I'm sure someone will come along with a way to improve on this, or who actually uses arrays and can give you the code for it. Pretty much you'd be looping through all the characters and I don't know arrays to tell you how it'd be done.

Thanks for the suggestion, but that is very far from ideal.

Oh regexp hero, where are you?