How to encompass the first letter in every word with HTML tags?

Question

How to encompass the first letter in every word with HTML tags?

For example:

$string = replace_first_word("some simple text",'<big>{L}</big>');
echo $string; //returns: <big>s</big>ome <big>s</big>imple <big>t</big>ext

edit: ohhh, forgot to mention one important point, it Needs to work with UTF-8 Unicode... because I'm planning to support both Russian and English with this.

Answer 1

Standard warning: manipulating HTML with regexes is a bad idea because it's next to impossible to correctly handle nesting, content inside tags vs outside, etc. So if you need a complete solution, parse the HTML and then manipulate text nodes.

In this psecific example that you've given, this should do it.

$output = preg_replace('!\b([a-zA-Z])!`, '<big>$1</big>`, $input);

It means find a word boundary (\b), which is zero width, and wrap the following letter in a <big> element.

Answer 2

Try this:

$string = preg_replace('/(?:^|\b)(\p{L})(\p{L}*)/u', '<big>$1</big>$2', 'some simple words');

Or if you want it in a function:

function replace_first_word($str, $format) {
    return preg_replace('/(?:^|\b)(\p{L})(\p{L}*)/u', str_replace('{L}', '$1', $format).'$2', $str);
}

Answer 3

i think what you need is

preg_replace('~(?<=\p{^L}|^)\p{L}~u', '<big>$0</big>', $input);

note that \b does not work properly with utf8.

Answer 4

here is a better and possibly faster version that i just found out myself, that supports utf-8 multibyte characters.

in my experience regex functions are slow in php, so here is a string manipulation based function.

function replace_first_word($text,$format='<big>{L}</big>'){
 //*** UTF-8 replace first letter of every word ***
 //split words
 $words = explode(' ', $text);
 //pick up each word
 foreach($words as &$word){
  //find out first letter of word
  $first = substr($word, 0,1);
  //remove first letter from word
  $word = substr($word,1);
  //replace first letter with formatted letter
  $first = str_replace('{L}',$first,$format);
  //add replaced letter to word
  $word = $first.$word;
 }
 //glue words back together and return them
    return implode(' ',$words);
}

also before php6 comes out, remember to set these 2 variables in php.ini to better support utf-8

mbstring.func_overload "7"
mbstring.internal_encoding "UTF-8"

Answer 5

You could use the CSS property

p { text-transform: capitalize; }

From Sitepoint's CSS reference on text-transform:

capitalize

• transforms the first character in each word to uppercase; all other characters remain unaffected — they’re not transformed to lowercase, but will appear as written in the document