#! code

I quite often find the need to extract a section of text from the beginning of a blog post or similar to be used as the excerpt. I normally use a function that will count the number of whole words available and return the string containing those words.

A good alternative to this, although only applicable if the original post is in HTML, is to use a regular expression to extract the contents. The following code will take a string and extract just the first paragraph of text.

Converting an array of information into a string is easy, but when you are doing this for insertion into a database having trailing commas is going to mess up your SQL statements.

Take the following example, which takes an array of values and converts them into a string of values. This practice is quite common in PHP database manipulation.

I recently talked about adding code to blogs and comments to Wordpress and making sure that certain characters are encoded properly. So to simplify things I thought I would create a little set of regular expressions that takes a sample of code and convert it into a Wordress friendly format. It consists of the following function, which takes the value of a text area called tochange and runs some regular expression replace functions on it.

Here are some of the regular expressions that I frequently use.

Find a blank line

^$

Spaces

[ \t]+

You can use this to break a text string apart into words.

Date

\d{1,2}(\-|\/|\.)\d{1,2}\1\d{4}

This will match anything in the format mm/dd/yyyy, or even dd/mm/yyyy.

Writing regular expressions can sometimes be a real pain, especially if you are not used to them. Rather than trying for yourself to make a regular expression you might want to think about looking for regular expressions that other people have made. Rather than reinventing the wheel to prove you can do something,using free third party regular expressions can save you a lot of time.