[PHP] search result highlighting / regexp voodoo

[Lee O'Mara]

At the risk of this looking like a cheap tactic for getting someone else to 
do my work for me, I'll put the disclaimer at the top. Understand that what 
I'm looking for is new perspective on a problem that I've spent too much 
time dealing with.

PROBLEM:
I want to produce short "snippets" for search result pages. The search 
results are already partially processed (search terms get wrapped in 
[strong] tags), but I keep hitting dead-ends with this step. Now, I've 
tried a wide number of approaches, spent an embarasing amount of time and 
arrived at no viable solution. Learning regular expressions would probably 
have been less painfull, but there you have it.

REQUIREMENTS:
- the snippet should be made up of five words on either side of the search 
terms.
- end product cannot have any unclosed/unmatched tags.

SETUP:
- Search terms are (already) marked up in [strong] tags with a class 
attribute of term1 - term3.
- No other tags exist in the string (other than aforementioned [strong] 
tags)

EXAMPLE INPUT:
The journalist/critic Edmund Gosse begins championing <strong 
class="term3">Ibsen</strong> in English periodicals. His article "<strong 
class="term3">Ibsen</strong> the Norwegian Satirist" (Fortnightly Review, 
January 1873) is later expanded in his book Studies in the Literature of 
Northern Europe (1879). In contrast, the conservative dramatic critic 
Clement W. Scott begins writing columns for <strong 
class="term1">London</strong>'s Daily Telegraph; he comes to consider the 
influence of <strong class="term3">Ibsen</strong> the worst thing that ever 
happened to English drama. His hysterically negative attack on <strong 
class="term3">Ibsen's</strong> Ghosts in 1891 will be paraphrased (and 
reduced to ridicule) by <strong class="term2">Shaw</strong> in the first 
chapter of The Quintessence of <strong class="term3">Ibsen</strong>ism 
(1891).

EXAMPLE OUTPUT:
... journalist/critic Edmund Gosse begins championing <strong 
class="term3">Ibsen</strong> in English periodicals. His article ... Scott 
begins writing columns for <strong class="term1">London</strong>'s Daily 
Telegraph; he comes to consider ... (and reduced to ridicule) by <strong 
class="term2">Shaw</strong> in the first chapter of The Quintessence...

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