how to highlight search results

Question

hello i have a search function in that i will search a db for keywords. i would like to highlight the keywords and found a second function that i would like to implement int

Answer 1

You shouldn't make it too hard for yourself. All you need it to replace every occurrence of a word with the word wrapped in the span with the required style applied. This should work for you:

function highlight_word( $content, $word, $color ) {
    $replace = '' . $word . ''; // create replacement
    $content = str_replace( $word, $replace, $content ); // replace content

    return $content; // return highlighted data
}

function highlight_words( $content, $words, $colors ) {
    $color_index = 0; // index of color (assuming it's an array)

    // loop through words
    foreach( $words as $word ) {
        $content = highlight_word( $content, $word, $colors[$color_index] ); // highlight word
        $color_index = ( $color_index + 1 ) % count( $colors ); // get next color index
    }

    return $content; // return highlighted data
}



// words to find
$words = array(
    'normal',
    'text'
);

// colors to use
$colors = array(
    '#88ccff',
    '#cc88ff'
);

// faking your results_text
$results_text = array(
    array(
        'ab'    => 'AB #1',
        'cd'    => 'Some normal text with normal words isn\'t abnormal at all'
    ), array(
        'ab'    => 'AB #2',
        'cd'    => 'This is another text containing very normal content'
    )
);

// loop through results (assuming $output1 is true)
foreach( $results_text as $result ) {
    $result['cd'] = highlight_words( $result['cd'], $words, $colors );

    echo '
ab: ' . $result['ab'] . '
cd: ' . $result['cd'] . '
';
}

Using Regular Expressions to replace content would do as well, though using str_replace() is a bit faster.

The functions accepts these arguments:

highlight_word( string, string, string );

highlight_words( string, array, array );

The above example results in: