I'm creating a collection of exercise descriptions stored in a mysql DB. Each exercise will have an ID by which it's called from a list to view all info, and then a name, video file name and description.

What I want to do is automatically find any exercise names in the descriptions that match any in the DB and automatically replace them with links to that exercise.

Sample listing:


Exercise A name

Exercise A description..... See also Exercise B Name.


So what I want to happen is the Exercise B Name in that description to be automatically enclosed in a link like <a href="exercises.php?exerciseID=whatever"></a>

I know how to replace a given string with another, but I don't know how to find matches in the DB and replace multiple matched strings each with a different link.

Any ideas? I haven't been able to find any kind of tutorials for this. Thanks in advance.

ok, i'm not quite certain the order of things. where is the originall list coming from?

Exercise A name

Exercise A description..... See also Exercise B Name.

all of this information should be in the db.. there won't be a need to go back and replace names with id's otherwise.

but if you cannot make the necessary changes, you can use a regular expression to find and replace names w/ links. i would look into 'preg_replace()'

something like this:

$str_of_excercises = "Exercise A name \n Exercise A description..... See also Exercise B Name";
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($rs))
{
 preg_replace(
  "/". $row["name"] ."/ig" ,
  "<a href=\"excercises.php?id=". $row["id"] ."\">". $row["name"] ."</a>" ,
  $str_of_excercises
 );
)
echo $str_of_excercies;

be carefull for duplicate replaces with this method...

personally, I would store all this in the db w/ the related links and have a nice and easy loop w/ xhtml structure... something like this

$rs = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM excercises ORDER BY name");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($rs))
{
 echo "<div class=\"excercise\">\n";
 echo "<h1 class=\"title\">". $row["name"] ."</h1>\n";
 echo "<p class=\"description\">". $row["description"] ."</p>\n";
 
 echo "<div class=\"related_links\">";
 
 $rsRelated = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM related_excercises WHERE idExcercise = ". $row["id"] ." ORDER BY name");
 
 if (@mysql_num_rows($rsRelated) > 0)
 {
  echo "See also, ";
 
  while ($row2 = mysql_fetch_array($rs))
   echo "<a href=\"excercise.php?id=". $row2["idExcercise"] ."\">". $row2["name"] ."</a>\n";
 
  echo "</div>\n";
 }
 
 echo "</div>\n";
}

Thanks! I'll check this out.