Generate HTML given a text file organized with carriage returns in PHP

Question

I'd like to be able to take in a file in PHP

**example_file.txt**
United States
Canada
-----------------------
Albania
Algeria
American Samoa
Andorra
Angola

and wrap these individual linebreaks in an HTML element that I pass it.

Example:

magicHtmlGenerator(example_file.txt, '<li>') 
// spits out <li>United States</li><li>Canada</li> etc

Answer 1

function magicHtmlGenerator($filename, $wrapper) {
    $x = file_get_contents($filename);
    return '<'.$wrapper.'>'.str_replace("\n",'</'.$wrapper.'><'.$wrapper.'>',$x).'</'.$wrapper.'>';
}

$html = magicHtmlGenerator('example_file.txt','li');
echo $html;

Answer 2

Load the file in and then use a regular expression to do the replacement.

preg_replace  ( \\r+([^\r]+)\r+\g  , \<li>$1</li>  ,  $str );

http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

Answer 3

Create a function which takes those two arguments, loads the lines (can be done easily via the file function), then iterate over them appending them to a string, padded with the HTML tag you want.

Answer 4

Here's another way:

$sxml = new SimpleXMLElement('<ul></ul>', LIBXML_NOXMLDECL);
$data = file('example_file.txt', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES);
foreach ($data as $line) {
    if (ctype_alpha($line)) {   // Or whatever test you need
        $sxml->addChild('li', $line);
    }
}
echo $sxml->asXML();

Output:

• Canada
• Albania
• Algeria
• Andorra
• Angola

Answer 5

No offence, but it sounds like you are trying to reinvent the wheel. Unless you find that an interesting coding exeercise, why not use of the emany templating systems out there? (hint: Smarty) That would leave your time free for "more important stuff".