Re: String manipulation out of the box solution?

Richard Lynch wrote:

On Tue, May 10, 2005 5:58 am, Merlin said:

I am writing an internal full text search engine and do have trouble in outputting the text in an apropriate way. Problem is that if there is more than one word I cant handle the text cropping. For example: Search term: php germany Text from database: There is no such great language than php. Amongh those countries using this language is Germany with a good percentage of users. Text output should be: ...language than php. Amongh... language is Germay with a good... Similar to the way google does it. I tried it now with a couple of ways but failed for most (I tried with strpos and substr). Is there a solution out of the box with php, or maybe anybody knows a good script which does that. This does sound like a standard feature to me.

Here's a quickie, untested, and probably with some kind of logic errors, or at least things not quite what you want. $fulltext = "There is no such great language than php. Amongh those countries using this language is Germany with a good percentage of users."; $words = explode(" ", "php germany"); $snippets = ''; while (list(, $word) = each($words)){ if (!stristr($snippets, $word)){ //skip this if we already got the word.

    $start = strpos($fulltext, $word);
    if ($start !== false){
      $end = $start + strlen($word);
      $jumpback = strpos(' ', $fulltext, $start - 20);
      $jumpforward = strpos(' ', $fulltext, $end + 20);
      $snippet = substr($fulltext, $jumpback, $jumpforward);
      $snippets .= " $snippet ";
    }

} } reset($words); while (, $word) = each($words)){ $snippets = str_replacei($word, "<b>$word</b>", $snippets); } echo $snippets; To Do: Might wanna store an array of start/end numbers for snippets, then sort by start, then combine those that "overlap" one end to the next start, *THEN* combine those snippets, so you don't have snippets out or order, nor overlapping. Still, I got ya started...

Hi Richard, thank you for the jump start! I have fixed some errors within the script and now it works ( I am attaching the script). You are right, the overlap is a to do. Best regards, Merlin <?php $fulltext = "There is no such great language than php. Amongh those countries using this language is Germany with a good percentage of users."; $words = explode(" ", "php Germany"); $snippets = ''; while (list(, $word) = each($words)){ if (!stristr($snippets, $word)){ //skip this if we already got the word.

    $start = strpos($fulltext, $word);
    if ($start !== false){
      $end = $start + strlen($word);
      $jumpback = strpos($fulltext, ' ',$start - 20);
      $jumpforward = strpos( $fulltext,' ', $end + 20);
      $snippet = '...'.substr($fulltext, $jumpback, $jumpforward).'...';
      $snippets .= " $snippet ";
    }

} } reset($words); while (list(, $word) = each($words)){ $snippets = str_replace($word, "<b>$word</b>", $snippets); } echo $snippets; ?>