I have a feature on my site where search results have the search query highlighted in results. However, some of the fields that the site searched through has HTML in it. For example, let's say I had a search result consisting of <span>Hello all</span>. If the user searched for the letter a, I want the code to return <span>Hello <mark>a</mark>all</span> instead of the messy <sp<mark>a</mark>n>Hello <mark>a</mark>ll</sp<mark>a</mark>n> that it would return now.
I know that I can use negative lookbehinds and lookaheads in preg_replace() to exclude any instances where the a is between a < and >. But how do I do that? Regular expressions are one of my weaknesses and I can't seem to come up with any that work.
So far, what I've got is this:
$return = preg_replace("/(?<!\<[a-z\s]+?)$match(?!\>[a-z\s]+?)/i", '<mark>'.$match.'</mark>', $result);But it doesn't seem to work. Any help?