Question

I have a form where users can quote others using bbcode. When somebody push quote button, the textarea value is :

[quote user=User date=1348246887 post=301]
User post text
[/quote]

And now, my code to transform into a block is :

$post = preg_replace("/\[quote user=(.*) date=(.*) post=(.*)](.*)\[\/quote\]/Uis", "<div class=\"quote\"><p>Quote by \\1 at time : \\2<a href=\"index.php?subject=".$_GET['subiect']."&post=\\3\">&nbsp;</a></p><span>\\4</span></div>", $post);

How can i convert the time to date into preg_replace ? In preg_replace i can’t do it, because the value of \2 is not set.

Answer 1

Try something like this (I added “test” inside the link, so you could see the link–not sure what you wanted there, but a non-breaking space won’t make the link visible.) I used htmlentities for security in case the “subiect” $_GET variable (which maybe you meant to be “subject”?) contained markup or quotes. And of course, you can customize the date() string first argument to your needs. Finally, I added \s+ to allow for more flexible whitespacing. I also changed delimiter ‘/’ to ‘@’ so you don’t need to escape ‘/’ within the regex.

Updated for older PHP compatibility:

<?php

$post = <<<HERE
[quote user=User date=1348246887 post=301]
User post text
[/quote]
HERE;
// ]  (just adding this comment to fix SO syntax colorer)

function replacer ($matches) {
    return '<div class="quote"><p>Quote by '.$matches[1].' at time : '.
        date('Y m d', $matches[2]).'<a href="index.php?subject='.
        htmlentities($_GET['subiect'], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8').
        '&post='.$matches[3].'">test&nbsp;</a></p><span>'.
        $matches[4].'</span></div>';
}

$post = preg_replace_callback(
    '@\[quote\s+user=(.*)\s+date=(.*)\s+post=(.*)](.*)\[/quote\]@Uis',
    'replacer',
    $post
);

var_dump($post);

?>