PHP: Breaking a string into multiple lines and man

Question

I have pulled a string out of a database it contains some html code as for example:

something about thing one<br>
now comes the second thing<br>
we're not done yet, here's another one<br>
and last but not least is the fourth one<br>

So I have four lines but when I print out the string I get an output like in the example above. What'd I'd like to do is manipulate every line so that I'd be able to do this:

<span>something about thing one</span>
<span>now comes the second thing</span>
<span>we're not done yet, here's another one</span>
<span>and last but not least is the fourth one</span>

I'd also like to have a counter for how many lines are there in a string (like for this one there are 4 lines) so I can set "odd" and "even" class for the span.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

Use explode to split and I would prefer for loop in these scenario instead of foreach as the latter will return an empty span tags in the end since it loops five times.

$arr    =   explode("<br>",$value);
for($i=0;$i<count($arr)-1; $i++){
echo "&lt;span&gt;".$arr[$i]."&lt;/span&gt;<br>";
}

To get the count you can use count function:

echo count($arr)-1;

Answer 2

Simply use the explode() function with PHP_EOL constant as delimiter:

$lines = explode(PHP_EOL, $original);

After you can iterate the returned array to parse lines, for example:

foreach ( $lines as $line )
{
    echo '<span>'.$line.'</span>';
}

Answer 3

You can explode the string with the delimiter and then use a foreach loop to get the answer you want.

$input = "omething about thing one<br>
now comes the second thing<br>
we're not done yet, here's another one<br>
and last but not least is the fourth one<br>";

//Explode the input string with br as delimiter

  $data = explode ('<br>', $input );

//Filter $data array to remove any empty or null values

$data   = array_filter($data);

//to get total data count

$count  = count($data);

//now use loop to what you want

$i = 1;
foreach ( $data as $output) 
{
    //create class based on the loop
    $class = $i % 2 == 0 ? 'even' : 'odd';
    echo '<span class="'. $class .'">'. $output .'</span>';
    $i++;
}

Hope this helps