Question

I have a group of text based rules that are structured like this:

 Rule 1: Do [XXX] when [PN] greater than [N] Rule 2: Get [PRD ..] and add [X.XX] 

To go with this is an array of data that translates each grouped code into a CSS class ID (for jQuery).

I also have an array of translations from [code] to ID stored in a simple structured array, like the following example:

$translate = array(     'XXX' => 'gen-string-input',      'PN' => 'gen-positivenumber-input',     'N' => 'gen-number-input' ); 

It is important that the following can be achieved:

I need to replace each instance of [code] with a span tag that is structured like this:

<span class='[classname]' unique='[hash]' offset='[offset]'>[CODE]</span> 

This is assuming that the fields are

• classname is the result of the $translate array
• hash is an md5 hash that is static for each rule
• offset is the position of the field in the string (e.g. in the first example, field [XXX] is at position 0, [PN] at position 1 and so on).

Based on this information, I would expect to achieve the following output for Rule 1:

<p>     Do <span class='gen-string-input'               unique='[md5]'              offset='0'>[XXX]</span>     when <span class='gen-positivenumber-input'                unique='[md5]'                 offset='1'>[PN]</span>     greater than <span class='gen-number-input'                         unique='[md5]'                         offset='2'>[N]</span> </p> 

Any help is greatly appreciated, I am currently using str_replace to try and achieve this but it is just not good enough.

Answer 1

Ok, actually what you need is preg_replace_callback. See the recursive callback examples.