Manually Constructing Links

Hi Mark99

If I understand you correctly, here's an excerpt from my CMSB Cookbook http://www.thecmsbcookbook.com that should help;

REPLACING ONE CHARACTER WITH ANOTHER USING “REGULAR EXPRESSIONS”
Sometimes you can run into problems when there’s a space, a dash or underscore between words in a field value. I ran into this recently with an implementation of Lightbox.

My client wanted to use a 2 word value for a field and Lightbox wanted to see a single word with no spaces. If I wasn’t displaying this value in other places on the page I could have put a dash or underscore in the value instead of a space.

I chose to use a dash to make Lightbox happy and to replace the dash with a space where it appeared on the page.

Here’s how for a multi record editor:(thanks to Chris at Interactive Tools for the code syntax)

Just insert the line in red into your code.

<?php foreach ($your_tableRecords as $record): ?>

<?PHP $record['your_field'] = preg_replace("/[-]/", "&nbsp;", $record['your_field'] ); ?>

<?php echo $record['your_field] ?>

<?php endforeach; ?>

Chris explained:

/[-]/ means "match a single character in the set [-]".
preg_replace() will repeat the match as many times as it can.

It’s also possible to match more than one character in the set by adding the additional characters as shown below. Changing the code above to this would replace any occurrence of a dash, an underscore, an r or an x with a space. The replacement will be case sensitive.

<?PHP $record['your_field'] = preg_replace("/[-_rx]/”, "&nbsp;", $record['your_field'] ); ?>

To make the replacement case insensitive, just ad an “i” to the end of the expression, like this:

<?PHP $record['your_field'] = preg_replace("/[-_rx]/i”, "&nbsp;", $record['your_field'] ); ?>

If you wanted to replace 2 different characters with 2 different ones, you’d do it by adding a second line of “preg_replace” code like this:

<?PHP $record['your_field'] = preg_replace("/[-]/", "&nbsp;", $record['your_field'] ); ?>
<?PHP $record['your_field'] = preg_replace("/[_]/", "*", $record['your_field'] ); ?>

The above code will replace any occurrence of a dash ("-") in the string with a space (" "). Then it will replace any occurrence of an underscore ("_") with an asterisk ("*").

For a single record editor, the code syntax would be.

<?PHP $your_tableRecord['your_field'] = preg_replace("/[-_rx]/”, "&nbsp;", $your_tableRecord['your_field'] ); ?>

If you want to replace a complete expression like <br> with another character then remove the forward slashes around the expression

So This:

<?PHP $your_tableRecord['your_field'] = preg_replace("/[-_rx]/”, "&nbsp;", $your_tableRecord['your_field'] ); ?>


Would become this:

<?PHP $your_tableRecord['your_field'] = preg_replace("[-_rx]”, "&nbsp;", $your_tableRecord['your_field'] ); ?>


According to Dave Edis, there are many other uses for “regular expressions”. He commented: “Basically regular expressions are ways of describing patterns. They're used to matching, and replacing content. So this is useful for validating input (such as determining if an url, credit card number, phone number, or email is in the right format), replacing content (stripping html tags, adding extra tags or attributes, etc, or parsing out data (matching all the email addresses in a web page, parsing a CVS file and importing the data, or extracting some data (such as the current temp from a weather web page to use somewhere else).

In PHP all the regular expression functions start with preg_ and in the CMS Builder code base we use those functions in over 200 places. So they come in quite handy. If your web page editor software has a "Find in Files" or search multiple files feature you can search the CMSB code for "preg_" and see some of the ways we use it.”

You can see a list of the PHP functions here:

http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php

Here’s a link to a regex cheat sheet:

http://www.bitcetera.com/en/techblog/2008/04/01/regex-in-a-nutshell/

Hope that works for you.

Best,

Jerry Kornbluth