string replacement....

[Admin]

"lets say i have a string like this"

i want replace "have" and "string" with something like

"<a href="foo">have</a>"
"<a href="bar">string</a>"

i want to do this on a medium scale site without slowing everything down too much.

i was thinking of reading the string into an array and then compairing each element against another array that held the replacements. however, i think that will slow everything down.

anyone have any ideas of how to implement somethign like this without too much overhead?

[joe_bruin]

str_replace() ?

[Admin]

how much overhead will that produce when run 2000 times per page view?

that is my biggest concern... i suppose i should just write it and test it...

[sde]

yeah, just run a microtime test .. i'd like to know the results!

[idx]

Hm, 2000 replacements per page view? Some benchmarks would be nice to have, but that sounds like an awful lot.

Any way to get around this? ie: Can this be done on a mass-scale one time with static documents, or are you loading [somewhat] dynamic data from a db, then parsing it for display?

What about caching the content with smarty? I recently wrote a horrid little "intranet CMS" thing for work where the page content is in a DB and users link from page to page in a wiki fashion. Sorta.. eg:

Click [login_help | here] for help with logging in.

So the data between the brackets would be replaced with: <a href="index.php?page=login_help">here</a> . (if the "| here" was left out, then "login_help" would be used as the link description) All of that is done via preg_replace().

(it also parses for %INCLUDE{"page_name"}% for inline page inclusion .. but same concept)

After that nothing else needs to be parsed until the page content is changed.

..The main thing is: what are your specific rules for replacement? How does know to link "have" to "foo" ?

-r