Question

I am Expanding/Condensing a Blog post using substrings, where the second substring is within a div tag that activates when a button is pressed (hence concatenating both substrings)

The code looks like as below:

<?php echo substr($f2, 0, 50);?>
<div id="<?php echo $f4; ?>" class = "hidden">
<?php echo substr($f2, 0, 5000);?></div>

My problem however is if the blog post contains html tags (e.g. <\li>, <\p>) and the initial substring ends before the termination of that set of tags, then obviously it causes major formatting problems.
Is there a way around this using my current method, or am I going to need to use something like an XML stylesheet (in which case please guide me through it)

EDIT:

I have semi-completed my request using DOMDocument.

$second = substr($f2, 50, 5000);
$dom= new DOMDocument();
    $dom->loadHTML($second);      
    $xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
    $body = $xpath->query('/html/body');
$secondoutput = ($dom->saveXml($body->item(0)));


$first = substr($f2, 0, 50);
$dom= new DOMDocument();
    $dom->loadHTML($first);      
    $xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
    $body = $xpath->query('/html/body');
$firstoutput = ($dom->saveXml($body->item(0)));

This works except, when the second subtring is called it no longer has the previous formatting as it has been purified.
Is there any way to reattch the previous HTML tag when the second substring is called?

Answer 1

There are diffrent solutions to this problem, but substr is not particularly suitable (as you mentioned).
You could use Regular Expressions, or a HTML-Parser.

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