Parsing a search string

[thefid]

Ok guys, I know this has been done many times, yet I currently don't have the code for this issue.

Problem: I wish to parse a search string and replace all characters of one type betweeen two other characters (of the same type).

For example, in a search engine search string you can place quotes to search for exact wording on a page. I wish to search for the double quote symbol - '"' and replace all space ' ' characters until I reach the second quote symbol (if the 2nd one exists). There may also be more than 2 double quotes in the string.

Does anyone have a good method for doing this? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
THEFID

 

[jpadie]

sounds like a job for a regular expression. search php.net for ereg_match or preg_match.

there is also a recent post on this forum where the user wished to extract an email address between "<" and ">" that will provide you with a good idea of some simple regular expression syntax (you are trying to do the same but with double quotes.

once you have the data you want through a regex then have a look at substr_replace to change your spaces into something else. (if you want to make the url safe then there is a rawurlencode in php that might give you what you want).

if you get comfortable with regex syntax you should be able to do the search and replace in one command.