RegExp help: add a space after ; unless part of specialchars

[marcnyc]

I need to add a space after all instances of ";" symbol in a text except if it is part of one of the special characters converted by htmlspecialchars() and or of a non-breaking space.

Can somebody suggest/help the correct syntax?

I have tried this with no luck:

$interview = preg_replace("/(^[&gt|&lt|&#039|&quot|&amp|&nbsp]+;)/si","\\1 ",$interview);

Thanks for your suggestions

[bobbymac]

Hi marcnyc

I don't think you can do this in one line, more like three.

Do you want to do this after the <,>,&,'," and non-breaking spaces have been encoded by htmlspecialchars, or before?

If after then this should work:

$interview = preg_replace("(/&[^;]+;)/si","\\1^",$interview);
$interview = preg_replace("/(;)[^\^]/si","\\1 ",$interview);
$interview = preg_replace("/(;)\^"/si","\\1",$interview); 

This replaces any ; that you want to keep with ;^, then adds spaces to all the other ; and then reverts the first set of ;^ back to ;, assuming that the original string doesn't have any of these.

I haven't tested this code, but you should be able to use the idea to solve your problem.

Paul