Question

I am trying to store a bunch of features in a database. The format I was thinking was to insert it like this:

Stuff Here|Separated By That|More Stuff|And some more

Now, I will need to grab that from the database and make it into a list like:

<ul>
    <li>Stuff Here</li>
    <li>Separated By That</li>
    <li>More Stuff</li>
    <li>And some more</li>
</ul>

Will that be easy to do? I know I can do:

str_replace("|", "<li>", $data);

but then that wouldn’t work for the very first item and the last item, plus closing tags. Is there anoher way I should be inserting my list into the database? Or is this way fine, and I just need the correct code to format the unordered list better?

Answer 1

I don’t think there’s a single-line piece of code you can use to do that (would love to be corrected), so yes, store your data as you currently are in the database and write a small helper function to split up the string and build the HTML list.

function build_list($string) {
  $output = '<ul>';
  $items = explode('|', $string);
  foreach ($items as $item) {
    $output .= '<li>' . $item . '</li>';
  }  
  $output .= '</ul>';

  return $output;
}