getting a link with str_replace

Question

hi! as a warning I have very limited experience with PHP, with just over 1 month of learning it.

I have a textform that when its submitted it goes through str_replaces on the allowed tags (eg [img]) to turn them into html tags.

What I want to do Is grab the URLS from the $string and add links to the original image and the url to the resized. What im basically asking, i guess, is how do i grab urls from a string? so that I can use them to add links to resized imgs.

<a href="linkToOriginal"><img src=""location/resize.php?file=', $string);`

what i do at the moment is just replace [img] with html img tag which is put right next to the url in the text field. $string being the large body of text.

 $imageOpen = str_replace('[img]', '<img src="http://location/resize.php?file=', $string);
   $imageClose = str_replace('[/img]', '"/></a>', $imageOpen);

If this isnt clear please tell me, as im pretty awful at explaining things!

Answer 1

If that's what you want to do every time, you should just have 2 text fields: "Image Source" and "Link Location", or something to that effect. Then you don't have to do any parsing, which is notoriously difficult.

Answer 2

I think you could better use some regular expressions here.. str_replace is to limited for this matter. When you use regular expressions you can open and close the tag in one replace with the value you want. You could take a look at this for instance:

    // images
$string = preg_replace("_\[img](.*)\[/img\]_si", '<img src="$1" alt="Image" />', $string);