Question

I’m trying to implement something like facebook’s like widget which says something like:

You, Name1, Name2 and 20 other people like this

I fetched all my data to be able to display this HTML, but I can’t seem to find the right algo to form the HTML string.

My main problem is that I don’t know when to put the and string or the , (comma) string. If I just had to put names, it would work, but the problem is that the You string always has to be first.

I’m going to paste my code here and the output I’m getting for some special cases (it’s PHP).

$current_user = 0;
$html = "";
$count = count($result);
$key = 0;
foreach($result as $liked){
    if($key + 1 > $limit)
        break;

    if($liked->uid == $user->uid){
        $current_user = 1;
        continue;
    }

    $html .= "<a href='".$liked->href."'>".$liked->name."</a>";

    if($key < $count - 2)
        $html .= ", ";
    elseif($key == $count - 2 && $key + 1 != $limit)
        $html .= " and ";

    $key++;
}

if($current_user){
    $userHtml = "You";

    if($count > 2)
        $userHtml .= ", ";
    elseif($count > 1)
        $userHtml .= " and ";

    $html = $userHtml.$html;
}

$html = "&hearts; by ".$html;

if($count > $limit){
    $difference = $count - $limit;
    $html .= " and ".$difference." ".format_plural($difference,"other","others");
}

return $html;

And in the special case where the current user is the last one to like this, it will show:

♥ by You, admin, edu2004eu and

Notice the and word doesn’t have anything after it, because You should have been after it, but I put it at the beginning. Any help? I just need the logic, not the actual code.

Answer 1

You can try something like this:

$likedBy = array('admin', 'eduard', 'jeremy', 'someoneelse');

// check if I like it and if so move me to the front
if (in_array($currentUsername, $likedBy)) {
  $me = array_search($currentUsername, $likedBy);
  unset($likedBy[$me]);
  array_unshift($likedBy, 'You');
}

// remove anything after the limit
$extra = array_splice($likedBy, 3);

// the comma list
$html = implode(', ', $likedBy);

// any extras? if so, add them here, if not rewrite the list so
// it's "You, Eduard and admin"
if (!empty($extra)) {
  $html .= ' and '.count($extra);
} else {
  $lastguy = array_splice($likedBy, 1);
  $html = implode(', ', $likedBy).' and '.$lastguy;
}

$html .= ' like this';