Question

I’m having some trouble with Converting Text to a list. The situation is that I get text like the following from the database:

"Hello, my name is michael, my hobbys are:
- computers
- guitar
and some more blabla "

No I want to transform the listed points(computers&guitar in this case) into an unordered html list, so the resulst should look like this:

"Hello, my name is michael, my hobbys are:
<ul>
<li>computers<li>
<li>guitar</li>
</ul>
and some more blabla ".

I think that the best solution would be doing this by regex, but my knowledge there isnt good enough to realise this. I tried it by replacing all /\n- / width a <li> tag, which worked. But how do I get the closing </li>, and even more confusing for me, how do I get the both <ul> tags?

Thank you in advance for any advice.

Answer 1

Your syntax looks almost identical to Markdown, a simple markup language. The only difference is a little bit of whitespace:

Hello, my name is Michael, my hobbies are:

 - Computers
 - Guitar

and some more blabla

It’s converted to this:

<p>Hello, my name is Michael, my hobbies are:</p>

<ul>
    <li>Computers</li>
    <li>Guitar</li>
</ul>

<p>and some more blabla</p>

There are a few PHP Markdown projects that I think you’ll find useful.