PHP: How to convert single quote to double quote in all HTML tags?

Question

Hi Guys,

How can I convert all single quotes to double quotes in all HTML tags only? Is there an easier way to do it? Thanks :)

For example: How can I convert this string (actual data from my work):

<TEXTFORMAT LEADING='2'><P ALIGN='LEFT'><FONT FACE='Verdana' style="font-size:10' COLOR='#0B333C'>My name's Mark</FONT></P></TEXTFORMAT>

To this:

<TEXTFORMAT LEADING="2"><P ALIGN="LEFT"><FONT FACE="Verdana" style="font-size:10" COLOR="#0B333C">My name's Mark</FONT></P></TEXTFORMAT>

Answer 1

Not really sure exactly what you are trying to accomplish... Replacing pieces of the string using php can be done using the str_replace function:

str_replace("'", "\"", $yourString);

Answer 2

Use Tidy which can fix your HTML soup and output clean XHTML. It does other nice things too, like fixing nesting problems, lowercasing tags, etcetera, etcetera.

Answer 3

I'm assuming that when you say in all html tags, that you mean all single quotes that contain an attribute. You wouldn't want <a onclick="alert('hi')"> converted b/c it would break the code.

Any regular expression is going to be fragile. If you know your input will be a particular set of simple cases, you might be ok with a regex. Otherwise, you'll want a DOM parser that understands complex html markup like onmouseover="(function () { document.getElementById(''); alert(\"...\")...})()" (for example). Add to that an attribute can span multiple lines. ;)

I haven't had to tackle this particular problem recently, but maybe there's a good way to do it with HTML Tidy (more here: http://devzone.zend.com/article/761) or a parser like this one http://sourceforge.net/projects/simplehtmldom/

Answer 4

If you don't care about the JavaScript and CSS issues mentioned elsewhere, try this:

$text = "<TEXTFORMAT LEADING='2'><P ALIGN='LEFT'><FONT FACE='Verdana' style='font-size:10' COLOR='#0B333C'>My name's Mark</FONT></P></TEXTFORMAT>";
echo preg_replace('/<([^<>]+)>/e', '"<" . str_replace("\\\\\'", \'"\', "$1") . ">"', $text);

This is taken from a thread by someone with exactly the same problem as you over at devshed.com.

Answer 5

I know i could hav'e using regex, but give this a try: assign $string the contents using fpen(), fread() etc...

$string = str_replace("'", '"', $string);
$array = explode('>', $string);
foreach($array as $key => $value){
    if(strpos($value, '<') <> 0 ){
       $array[$key] = str_replace('"', "'",$value);
    }
}
$string = implode('>',$array);

Answer 6

I would go with either a dom parser or roll my own simple tag parser that understands quoting as well as escaping quote characters so that it doesn't take "he said \"blah\"" as he said \, blah\ and empty string.

It could detect whether the quoting to be modified is inside a tag easily. Over many years I have learned that regular expressions are way too fragile for such tasks.