Question

I’ve tried looking into preg_replace, except that I have not much experience with regular expressions.

What I’m trying to do is replace a portion of text ending with a colon and make it bold and put a line break in before and 2 line breaks after.

IE convert this text

title1: is some text here. title2: another piece of text.

to

**title1:**
is some text here.

**title2:**
another piece of text

I’ve tried doing something like this…

preg_replace("!\*(.*?)\*!$:","\<br \/\>\<strong\>!\*(.*?)\*!\<\/strong\>\<br \/\>",$text);

I can’t seem to get it to work.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

Andi

Answer 1

preg_replace regexes need to be delimited. So, first, try encasing your regex in slashes. Second, I don’t understand your regex. Something simple like /(\w+):/ should work.

preg_replace("/(\w+):/", "<br><br><b>$1</b><br>", $text);

@AndiLeeDavis Edited answer to handle multi-word titles and get rid of extraneous breaks at the beginning:

$mtext = preg_replace("/\.?\s*([^\.]+):/", "<br><br><b>$1</b><br>", $text);
if (strcmp(substr($mtext, 0, 8), "<br><br>") == 0) $mtext = substr($mtext, 8);