Question

I’m new to PHP so I don’t know whether this is possible.

I need to add brackets to different timestamps so that this:

<span class="time">2:26</span>
<span class="time">2:51</span>
<span class="time">3:37</span>
<span class="time">1:19</span>

becomes this:

<span class="time">(2:26)</span>
<span class="time">(2:51)</span>
<span class="time">(3:37)</span>
<span class="time">(1:19)</span>

EDIT

The above HTML is generated using a simple DOM parser to grab info from a webpage.

Answer 1

If this is part of a larger HTML string or if the syntax might differ, it’s a better idea to use a DOM parser.

However, if that isn’t the case you can do this:

$string = str_replace('<span class="time">', '<span class="time">(', $string);
$string = str_replace('</span>', ')</span>', $string);

Or you can use regex:

$string = preg_replace('/<span class=\"time\">(\d+\:\d+)<\/span>/', '<span class="time">($1)</span>', $string);