Question

I have a chatlog file that looks like this (name represents screenames and text is their chat string)

name: some text
name2: more text
name: text
name3: text

I want to color all names up to the : red.
For example: <font color=red>myname:</fontcolor> hello
How would I do this?

I’m not sure why, but this code colors everything after the colon

echo preg_replace('/(.*?):/', "<font color=#F00>$1</font>:", $output);

Answer 1

A correct answer to this question has been provided previously:

Look at the second answer:

PHP: insert text up to delimiter

In addition, your implementation is wrong, look at the regular expression it should start with ^ :

echo preg_replace('/(.*?):/', "<font color=#F00>$1</font>:", $output);

Should be:

echo preg_replace('/^(.*?):/', "<font color=#F00>$1</font>:", $output);