Question

In my PHP forum i want people to insert pictures just by inserting the number/ID of the picture (which they can see in an online photoalbum)

I am looking for a function that can read a string from their posts for example

“bla bla and look at this amazing picture [IMG]234[/IMG] isn’t it awesome …”

then finds the picture in a database with the ID 234 and replaces [IMG]234[/IMG] with
<img src = "path/to/image.jpg" />

preg_replace wouldn’t work 🙁 does anyone have an Idea?
thanks for Your help in advance

Answer 1

Your code needs to make a db call to get the path from the ID.

Use a tag parser or basic regex to match \[img][0-9]+\[/img]. (preg_match)

Then query your database for the path with the match result as the ID.

Finally, use str_replace to replace the original “[img]$match[/img]” with

Example (pseudo, look these functions up first)

$matches = preg_match_all('\[img][0-9]+\[/img]', $input);
$output = $input;
foreach ($matches as $match) {
   $cur = mysql_query("SELECT path FROM table WHERE ID = $match");
   $row = mysql_fetch_array($cur);
   $output = str_replace('[img]'.$match.'[/img]',$row['path'],$output);
}

Note: this will only work with tags in lowercasse: img and not with IMG, iMG, ImG and so on.