CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexemail
TheDude
TheDude

Reputation: 3105

Parse email reply quotes using regexp

I have a PHP script that deals with emails, I'd like to catch strings like this one:

>> John replied with a nice hi...
>> then added a second hi...
>
>> Ray said hello

Note the 3rd line contains only > instead of >>

and normalise it, ie. transform it into:

>> John replied with a nice hi...
>> then added a second hi...
>>
>> Ray said hello

In other words, I'd like to catch non-empty lines which starts with > & replace them with >>

My question may look worthless, but I have a nice regexp that takes these > & format them nicely, ie.

>> John replied with a nice hi...
>> then added a second hi...
>>
>> Ray said hello

becomes

[quote]
    John replied with a nice hi...
    then added a second hi...

    Ray said hello
[/quote]

The scenario above breaks my formatting & makes the final output looks like this:

[quote_level_1]
    John replied with a nice hi...
    then added a second hi...
[/quote_level_1]

[quote_level_2]
[/quote_level_2]

[quote_level_1]
    Ray said hello
[/quote_level_1]

My question is Is there a regexp I can use to handle this situation? I tried many regular expressions, none of them gave me correct results :(

I'm using PHP 5.4

EDIT

I'm afraid I didn't formulate my question accurately (sorry about that), what I want is to catch non-empty lines which starts with > & replace them with >>, but only if the line in question is located between 2 non-empty lines which starts with >>

I hope I clarified my question, sorry!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 465

Answers (2)

wroniasty
wroniasty

Reputation: 8052

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

This seems to be a straightforward regexp application.

$normalized_text = preg_replace("/^>(.+)/m", ">>${1}", $your_text);

Upvotes: 0

nickb
nickb

Reputation: 59699

I'd like to catch non-empty lines which starts with > and replace them with >>

That regex looks like this:

/^>(?=[^>])/m

Where the / is the delimiter, ^ matches the beginning of the line (because we specified multi-line mode with the m modifier), and then specify that we must match something that isn't a > after the first >.

You would use it in PHP like this:

preg_replace( '/^>(?=[^>])/m', '>>', $str)

And you can see from this demo that this prints:

>> John replied with a nice hi...
>> then added a second hi...
>>
>> Ray said hello

Upvotes: 2

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