Help?

95 Posts

nsfdev Reply #1, 16 years, 5 months ago

I know this isn’t really the place to learn PHP, but this should be simple, I think. There’s a Wordpress plugin called Widon’t that’s been ported to a number of CMS. The heart of it is this:

preg_replace( '|([^\s])\s+([^\s]+)\s*$|', '$1 $2', $str);

It is supposed to replace the space between the last two words of a string with a   The help doc at http://svn.modxcms.com/docs/display/revolution/Plugins gives this example of text parsing:

$words = array("snippet", "template"); // words to filter
$output = &$modx->resource->_output; // get a reference to the output
$output = str_replace($words,"<b>[filtered]</b>",$output);

And says to register it with the OnWebPagePrerender event. By analogy, then, I thought something like this:

$output = &$modx->resource->_output;
$output = preg_replace( '|([^\s])\s+([^\s]+)\s*$|', '$1 $2', $output);

would do the trick, but it doesn’t.

Would someone please tell me why it doesn’t and what will?

MODX Staff
10,725 Posts

opengeek Reply #2, 16 years, 5 months ago

That should work, though to make it even simpler:

<?php
$modx->resource->_output = preg_replace( '|([^\s])\s+([^\s]+)\s*$|', '$1 $2', $modx->resource->_output);
?>

Did you clear your cache after making the changes to the plugin? The plugin will not get registered in a Context until that Context’s cache is cleared. Also, this will not work on binary Content Types, but that should be obvious.

Jason Coward
Chief Architect @ MODX
http://www.jasoncoward.com | http://twitter.com/drumshaman | https://github.com/opengeek

95 Posts

nsfdev Reply #3, 16 years, 5 months ago

Thank you, you were correct that it worked. Looking closer I found the real culprit, the plugin works but the regular expression isn’t specific enough. It treats the entire page as a string, not the content of individual elements. Checking the source, I found this:

</body> </html>

which I should have noticed sooner.

I need some way to tell it to restrict itself to the contents of specific elements. I have no idea how to do that and would very much appreciate any pointers. Does PHP do DOM parsing or would I have to figure out what’s what with regular expressions?