using namespace kyle; - different approaches

Different Approaches

Kyle Kirby

December 12, 2012

Today I challenged myself to come up with two vastly different approaches to a problem. The problem being that I needed to conform a string of text to lines of a certian length without breaking words. My first approach was to use arrays and a bunch of logic. The second method was to use regular expressions. I think the regular expression approach is much more delightful. See below.

<?php
function conformTextToLengthOld($text,$length){
	$words = explode(' ',$text);
	$lines = array();
	$currentLine = &$lines[];
	$currentLength = 0;
	foreach($words as $word){
		if($currentLength + count($currentLine) + strlen($word) > $length && $currentLength != 0){
			$currentLine = &$lines[];
			$currentLength = 0;
		}
		$currentLength += strlen($word);
		$currentLine[] = $word;
	}
	$lines = array_map(function($in){
		return implode(' ',$in);
	},$lines);
	return implode('<br/>',$lines);
}

function conformTextToLength($text,$length){
	return str_replace(
		"\n",
		'<br/>',
		trim(
			preg_replace(
				'/(.{1,' . $length . '})(?:\s|$)/',
				"\$1\n",
				$text
			)
		)
	);
}

var_dump(
	conformTextToLengthOld('Be a better friend to my taste buds.',11),
	conformTextToLength('Be a better friend to my taste buds.',11)
);
?>

Outputs:
string(48) "Be a better<br/>friend to<br/>my taste<br/>buds."
string(48) "Be a better<br/>friend to<br/>my taste<br/>buds."

Interesting stuff.