Is there a way to place a '>' sign at the beginning of a line using PHP?

Question

If I have a textarea like the one I'm using to type this message. I would like to append or concat a '>' to every line that breaks. The problem I am having is that I don't know where the lines break. What I want to do is emulate an email message when someone replies, they see '>' appended to every line. Is there a function for this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

How about replacing all line-breaks with a line-break and a greather-than? Something like this perhaps:

$subject = str_replace (PHP_EOL, PHP_EOL.'>', $subject);

Answer 2

If it's for an email message, you could take a string and use the wordwrap function to break at about 75 chars:

$reply='> '.wordwrap($original, 75, "\n> ");

Because you can supply your own break string, you can include the > right there!

If the original is already broken into lines, then simply replace existing line break:

$reply='> '.str_replace ("\n", "\n >", $original);

Answer 3

You can use the str_replace() function in PHP.

Answer 4

You mean on the client side? You'll need to do that in javascript.

Answer 5

A little better for email quoting is:

$text = $_POST['text'];
$text = str_replace("\r\n", "\n", $text);
$text = str_replace("\r", "\n", $text);

$text = str_replace("\n", "\n> ", $text);
$text = wordwrap($text, 75, "\n> ");
$text = str_replace("\n> >", "\n>>", $text);
$text = ($text[0] == '>' ? '>' : '> ') . $text;
$text = htmlspecialchars($text);

This adds the always-useful space between the '>' and the text, while not bloating it by adding spaces between multiple quote levels.

Even better is if you can make it not wordwrap lines that are already quoted in the original message. Better still, implement format=flowed. But either of these'll take considerably more code.

Answer 6

First off, thanks to Paul Dixon - great and simple idea :) Anyway I had some two problems with the solution: empty lines and lists (which have already \n linebreaks) wouldn't begind with > and long links are not cut after the given number of charaters.

So here is my extension to Pauls idea:

$reply = wordwrap($original, 75, "\n", true);
$reply = '> '.str_replace ("\n", "\n> ", $reply);

The first line wraps $original to 75 chars, breaks with \n and forces breaking of long words (ie: urls). The second line replaces the line breaks with a break and the > and adds an extra > to the beginning of the whole string.

Maybe this could be done easier but it works for me ;)