continued : unable to post fields to the next page in php and HTML

Question

So I have fields that are generated dynamically in a different page and then their results should posted to story.php page. fields is going to be : *noun1 *noun2 *noun3 and story is going to be : somebody is doing *noun1 etc. What I want to do is to replace *noun1 in the story with the *noun, I have posted from the previous page ( I have *noun1 posted from the previous page ) but the code below is not working :

$fields = $_POST['fields'];
$story = $_POST['story'];
$fieldsArray = split(' ', $fields);
for ($i = 0; $i < count($fieldsArray); $i++) {
    ${$fieldsArray[$i]} = $_POST[$fieldsArray[$i]];
}

// replace words in story with input
for ($i = 0; $i < count($story); $i++) {
    $thisWord = $story[$i];
    if ($thisWord[0] == '*')
     $story[$i] = ${$thisWord.substring(1)};
}
$tokensArray = split(' ',$tokens);

echo $story;

Answer 1

Your problem is likely that you are trying to echo $story, which I gather is an array. You might have better luck with the following:

$storyString = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < count($story); $i++)
{
    $storyString .= $story[i] . ' ';
}

echo $storyString;

echo can't print an array, but you can echo strings to your heart's content.

Answer 2

You almost certainly don't want variable variables (e.g. ${$fieldsArray[$i]}). Also, $thisWord.substring(1) looks like you're trying to invoke a method, but that's not what it does; . is for string concatenation. In PHP, strings aren't objects. Use the substr function to get a substring.

preg_replace_callback can replace all your code, but its use of higher order functions might be too much to get into right now. For example,

function sequence($arr) {
    return function() {
      static $i=0
      $val = $arr[$i++];
      $i %= count($arr);
      return $val;
    }
}
echo preg_replace_callback('/\*\w+/', sequence(array('Dog', 'man')), "*Man bites *dog.");

will produce "Dog bites man." Code sample requires PHP 5.3 for anonymous functions.