Question

We have a variable with hmtl code inside.

<?php echo $list; ?>

This will give something like:

<li><a href='http://site.com/2010/' title='2010'>2010</a></li>
<li><a href='http://site.com/2009/' title='2009'>2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://site.com/2008/' title='2008'>2008</a></li>

Want to add class for each <li>, it can be taken from title attribute:

<li class="y2010"><a href='http://site.com/2010/' title='2010'>2010</a></li>
<li class="y2009"><a href='http://site.com/2009/' title='2009'>2009</a></li>
<li class="y2008"><a href='http://site.com/2008/' title='2008'>2008</a></li>

We should work with variable $list.

Tentative scheme:

• search for title attribute in each
  <li>....</li>
• throw its value to the class, which we add for opening <li>

PHP solution wanted.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Parsing the DOM sounds like overkill to me, if I understand the problem you’re facing. Assuming that you know for sure that the entire contents of the $list variable will be structured as <li><a href='foo' title='bar'>bar</a></li> then you can do what you’re asking pretty easily by combining regular expressions with a loop:

$list = "<li><a href='http://site.com/2010/' title='2010'>2010</a></li>
<li><a href='http://site.com/2009/' title='2009'>2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://site.com/2008/' title='2008'>2008</a></li>";
preg_match_all("/title='([^']*)'/s",$list,$matches); //this gets all titles
$output=$list;
foreach($matches[1] as $match) { //this applies the titles to the li elements
  $location = strpos($output,"<li>");
  $output = substr($output,0,$location)."<li class='".$match."'>".substr($output,$location+4);
}

If you echo $output:

<li class="y2010"><a href='http://site.com/2010/' title='2010'>2010</a></li>
<li class="y2009"><a href='http://site.com/2009/' title='2009'>2009</a></li>
<li class="y2008"><a href='http://site.com/2008/' title='2008'>2008</a></li>