[solaera]

Hello, all...

I'm having some difficulty with using preg_replace in PHP to find lines in a large block of HTML which do not contain a certain string and bracketing them with <em> tags.

Basically, I've got a huge block of text sent from a form, which I did nl2br on to make it display with spaces.

I now want to find anything that starts with two line breaks (<br /><br />) that then are *not* followed by a span tag, go all the way to the *next* set of line breaks, and surround the whole thing with <em></em>

In other words:

<br /><br />
<span class="gold">Some varying text here.</span><br /><br />
Some other text here, not wrapped in a span tag.<br /><br />

I'd like to do a preg_replace which finds the second line (because it does not have the <span> tag) and makes it italic.

Anyone have any thoughts on how to do this in PHP? Let me know if the question isn't clear or if you need more information. Thanks!

[requinix]

1. The initial <br>s will have a line break after them. Use \s+ for that.
2. A negative assertion can check if the bit after isn't a <span> tag; it looks like (?!..).
3. An ungreedy dot-all for the rest, going up to a <br><br> or the end of the string.