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Replace on save

Question

How do I use $ROSPatterns? What can I use them for? Show me some examples that work please?

Answer

The ROS (Replace On Save) array defines a pattern as key and a text which should replace it when saving an edited text. The $ROSPatterns are enabled by placing them in the local/config.php file.

In general
$ROSPatterns ["text to search for"] = "text to replace with";

The "text to search for" is searched and replaced using the PHP preg_replace function, thus the pattern has to use the preg_replace syntax.

Examples

You can use a replace on save pattern to assist you when converting HTML to wiki. The following patterns work

# replace both <i> and </i>, upper and lower case
$ROSPatterns ["/<\\/?i>/i"]    = "''";  

# replace both <b> and </b>, upper and lower case
$ROSPatterns ["/<\\/?b>/i"]    = "'''";  

# replace <em>, upper and lower case, markup must be enabled in config.php
$ROSPatterns ["/<em>/i"]       = "'~";   

# replace </em>, upper and lower case, markup must be enabled in config.php
$ROSPatterns ["/<\\/em>/i"]    = "~'";  

# replace <strong>, upper and lower case, markup must be enabled in config.php
$ROSPatterns ["/<strong>/i"]   = "'*";  

# replace </strong>, upper and lower case, markup must be enabled in config.php
$ROSPatterns ["/<\\/strong>/i"] = "*'"; 

# replace <sup>, upper and lower case
$ROSPatterns ["/<sup>/i"]      = "'^";   

# replace </sup>, upper and lower case
$ROSPatterns ["/<\\/sup>/i"]   = "^'";   

# replace <sub>, upper and lower case
$ROSPatterns ["/<sub>/i"]      = "'_";   

# replace </sub>, upper and lower case
$ROSPatterns ["/<\\/sub>/i"]   = "_'";   

# replace both <br> and <br />, upper and lower case
$ROSPatterns ["/<br\\s*\\/?>/i"] = "[[<]]"; 

# replace both <p> and </p>, upper and lower case
$ROSPatterns ["/<\\/?p>/i"]    = "\n\n";   

# replace html links with the [[link|text]] markup
$ROSPatterns ['/<\\s*?a.+?href\\s*?=\\s*?["\'](.*?)["\'].*?>(.*?)<\/a>/sim'] = '[[$1|$2]]';   

# extract the image link from the <img ...> tag
$ROSPatterns ['/<\\s*?img.+?src\\s*?=\\s*?["\'](.*?)["\'].*?>/sim'] = '$1'; 

# replace <h1> and </h1>, upper and lower case
$ROSPatterns["/<h1\\s*>/i"] = "\n!"; 
$ROSPatterns["/<\\/h1\\s*>/i"] = "";

Replace Curly Quotes

Use this to replace curly quotation marks:

$ROSPatterns ['/\x{201C}/u'] = '"';
$ROSPatterns ['/\x{201D}/u'] = '"';
$ROSPatterns ['/\x{2018}/u'] = "'";
$ROSPatterns ['/\x{2019}/u'] = "'";

Notes

More patterns will be added to cater for other simple HTML constructs.

• This recipe was last tested on PmWiki version: 2.11

Releases

Add these patterns to the bottom of your local/config.php

Comments

The following test cases were used

<i>italic</i> <I>ITALIC</I>

bre<br>ak    br<br />eak    BRE<BR>AK    BR<BR />EAK    BRE<BR  />EAK

<b>bolD</B> <B>Bold</b>

<EM>em</em>

<sup>sup</sup>erscript <sub>sub</sub>script

<strong>strong</STRONG>

This is a simple <p>paragraph</p> sort of.

See Also

Contributors

Incorrect Links

 
 $ROSPatterns["/\\[{2}([^\/|\\[\\]]*?)(\/){0,1}([^\/|\\[\\]]*?)\\. 
 ([^|\\]\\[]*?)\\]{2}/i"] =
  	"[[$1$2$3 $4|$3. $4]]";

The explanation of the pattern:

  Match the character "[" literally «\[{2}»
     Exactly 2 times «{2}»
  Match the regular expression below and capture its match into 
backreference number 1 «([^/|\[\]]*?)»
     Match a single character NOT present in the list below «[^/|\[\]]*?»
        Between zero and unlimited times, as few times as possible, 
expanding as needed (lazy) «*?»
        One of the characters "/|" «/|»
        A [ character «\[»
        A ] character «\]»
  Match the regular expression below and capture its match into 
backreference number 2 «(/){0,1}»
     Between zero and one times, as many times as possible, giving back 
as needed (greedy) «{0,1}»
     Match the character "/" literally «/»
  Match the regular expression below and capture its match into 
backreference number 3 «([^/|\[\]]*?)»
     Match a single character NOT present in the list below «[^/|\[\]]*?»
        Between zero and unlimited times, as few times as possible, 
expanding as needed (lazy) «*?»
        One of the characters "/|" «/|»
        A [ character «\[»
        A ] character «\]»
  Match the character "." literally «\.»
  Match the character " " literally « »
  Match the regular expression below and capture its match into 
backreference number 4 «([^|\]\[]*?)»
     Match a single character NOT present in the list below «[^|\]\[]*?»
        Between zero and unlimited times, as few times as possible, 
expanding as needed (lazy) «*?»
        The character "|" «|»
        A ] character «\]»
        A [ character «\[»
  Match the character "]" literally «\]{2}»
     Exactly 2 times «{2}»

Special Characters

Beware of default encoding mismatching when trying to handle special characters. For example:

$ROSPatterns ["/\x{2026}/u"] = "…";

Should change a typed ellipsis into an html entity … -- but when I was EDITING the wiki, my browser's default encoding was WESTERN ISO-Latin-1 (no idea why!). So not only didn't the typed ellipsis character (option-: on the Mac) match the unicode, but this code would throw an error and wipe all contents from the page. Changing my browser's default encoding to UTF-8 solved the issue, but this is a USER-END problem, so using ROSPatterns on special characters can hurt, since character codes are a user-end issue. :/

And that means if I type a ™ in the pattern match /™/ (presumably to change it to ™) that it will only match if someone types in that character in the same encoding that I used in the PHP file.

XES August 16, 2010, at 09:21 AM