Regular Expression to format certain lines of text

Question

I am trying to improve my in-site personal messaging system by making it look nicer and feel more like e-mail. I currently add > before each line of replied text, but I would also like to add formatting such as font color to lines that start with ">" without the quotes. I am not sure how I would close the lines out with a regular expression. To open it I assume I should do something like the following?

$new_text = preg_replace("\> \is", "<font color=\"grey\">> ", $text);

Answer 1

preg_replace("/^(>.*)$/im", "<span style=\"color: red;\">\\1</span>", $reply);

Answer 2

ereg_replace('^>(.*)', '<span class="quoted">&gt;\\1</span>', $content);

Answer 3

preg_replace('/(\n>[^\n]*)+/','<span class="reply">$1</span>', $message);

Something like that will enclose the quoted reply with something you can style up.

Answer 4

In addition to the good answers already posted, you may want to escape the captured text before treating it as HTML. With simple replacement, some characters in the quoted text (specifically '<', '>' and '&') will make your generated HTML invalid. (I'm assuming it isn't already escaped, or you would need to match ">" instead of ">".)

To ensure that the replacement yields valid HTML, you can do something like this:

function quote_markup($matches) {
    $quote = htmlspecialchars($matches[1]);
    return "<span style=\"color: red;\">$quote</span>",
}

preg_replace_callback("/^(>.*)$/im", 'quote_markup', $reply);