Member Avatar for micahgeorge

Hi,
I was making a search box and was trying to highlight the words that the users will enter in the search box,for example if the user enter "kids" in the searchbox it should highlight the "kids" word in the result............. is anyone have an idea how to do that

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  • 5 Replies
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  • 17 Hours Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by muralibobby2015

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Member Avatar for nonshatter

You will need some sort of regular expression to find the matching word.
E.g:

$i=0;
while (there are results)
{
    if(preg_match("/the search term/i", $results[$i], $yellow))
    {
           echo "<span id = "yellow">" $yellow[$i] . $results[$i] ."</span><br>";
    }
}

Not exactly... but you can follow the logic x

Edited by nonshatter because: n/a
Member Avatar for james.newell

Hi micahgeorge,

I've done this before in a previous project. However I didn't use PHP, rather JS. Once the user entered the search term, the term was submitted to a PHP script that displayed the search results. Each of the search result URLs were appended with ?query=<search-term>. I then placed JS (there are pre-existing scripts and I didn't want to rewrite the wheel) code on the page to check for the ?query=<search-term> and highlight the search term if it was found.

I used a jQuery plugin to highlight the words on the page.

Cheers,

James

Edited by james.newell because: n/a
Member Avatar for james.newell

Using a regular expression is a valid way of highlighting words too. However it gets quite difficult to write one that doesn't affect the page's HTML. You pretty much end up having to write a HTML parser so you don't muck up the HTML. In my previous project I started writing my own regular expression but moved to a pre-built solution after noticing how the regular expression caused formatting errors on a few pages.

Consider trying to highlight the term "bug".

<p class="bug-paragraph">This paragraph is about bugs...</p>

And consider the broken result of nonshatter's regular expression (I know that he has oversimplified it however consider how difficult it is to write a regular expression that highlights all instances and doesn't destroy HTML- try highlighting "class", "p", HTML entities (e.g. ate => &#38;#65;te etc).

<p class="<span class="search-term">bug</span>-paragraph">This paragraph is about <span class="search-term">bug</span>s...</p>
Edited by james.newell because: for clarity
Member Avatar for micahgeorge

You will need some sort of regular expression to find the matching word.
E.g:

$i=0;
while (there are results)
{
    if(preg_match("/the search term/i", $results[$i], $yellow))
    {
           echo "<span id = "yellow">" $yellow[$i] . $results[$i] ."</span><br>";
    }
}

Not exactly... but you can follow the logic x

Hi nonshatter,
Thanks for ur reply but I am a beginner will you please explain ur code.... I tried this but not getting....

Edited by micahgeorge because: n/a
Member Avatar for muralibobby2015

go through this

<? 
ob_start();

extract($_REQUEST); 
extract($_POST);

$searchtext=$_REQUEST['searchtext'];/////////////$_REQUEST['searchtext'] your search content
if($searchtext=='')
{
$exists=1;
}
function search_highlight($needle, $replace, $haystack)
{
 $haystack = eregi_replace($needle,$replace,$haystack);
 return $haystack;
}
//echo $searchtext;exit;
?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>

<body>
 <?
       if($searchtext!='')
       {
        $selectstatic=mysql_query("select * from static_pages where description like '%$searchtext%'");
         $count=mysql_num_rows($selectstatic);
         if($count>0)
         {
         ?>
         <p  class="blue_hrd">Search Content "<?=$searchtext?>"</p>
         <?
        
while($fetchstatic=mysql_fetch_array($selectstatic))
{
         ?>
        <div style="width:850px; float:left; margin:0px; padding:0px;">
         <p class="normal_text"><span class="blue_textt"><strong><?=$fetchstatic['name']?></strong></span><br />
         <? echo search_highlight($searchtext, "<b><font style='color:white; background-color:grey;'>" . $searchtext . "</font></b>", $fetchstatic['description']);?>
         </p>
         </div>
          <?
         }
         }
        }
         ?>
</body>
</html>
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