Question

So the problem.. I have been stuck with this one for a good month now, so please any help would be really appreciated.

I am trying to highlight words in a string, from words in an array. The problem I am having is with nested tags.

$bold=array();
$bold="tree,apple tree,orange";
$description="orange and apple tree";

For example; the result I want would be this <strong>orange</strong> and <strong>apple tree</strong>, but the result I am getting is this <strong>orange</strong> and <strong>apple <strong>tree</strong></strong>

I have cobbled together this so, but it doesn’t work as desired, so feel free to amend or trash, if my approach is incorrect.

function highlightWords($text, $words){
 foreach ($words as $word){
  $word = preg_quote($word);
  $word = (str_replace("/","",$word));
  $text = preg_replace("/(?!<.*?)(".preg_quote($word,'/').")(?![^<>]*?>)/si",'<strong>\1</strong>', $text);
 }
 return $text;
}
$description =  highlightWords($description, $bold);

Answer 1

If I have understood your question correctly, this is your solution:

function highlightWords($text, array $words){
  $words = array_map(preg_quote, $words);
  return preg_replace('/(' . implode('|', $words). ')/is', '<strong>$1</strong>', $text);
}

$text = 'orange and aPPle tree';
$boldWords = array('tree', 'apple tree', 'orange');

$text =  highlightWords($text, $boldWords);
echo $text;

Example: http://www.ideone.com/at4lw

You call the function highlightWords with the initial text and an array of words to highlight. The function returns the text with the highlighted words.