For my WordPress Search results page, I have added highlighting to show where search term appears on the results page. But the replacement code changes the text of the page to the case that was used in the search term.

For example:

Search Term:                                      remote Employee ENGAGE 
Text on Page before highlight:                    Remote employee engagement 
Resulting text after highlight replacement:       remote Employee ENGAGEment
Desired text after highlight replacement:         Remote employee engagement

Here is the code I used in my content-search.php

<?php $title = str_ireplace( $s, '<span class="search-instance">'.$s.'</span>', get_the_title() ) ?>
<?php $excerpt = str_ireplace( $s, '<span class="search-instance">'.$s.'</span>', get_the_excerpt() ) ?> 
<?php echo $title; ?>   
<?php echo $excerpt; ?>

And the css to highlight the text:

span.search-instance {
   font-weight: bold;
   background: #fffdca;
   padding: 2px;
}

Can someone offer some suggestions on how to get the highlighting done, with a case-insensitive search, but also without changing the case of the text on the page during the highlighting process.

Cheers, SunnyOz

UPDATE:

I don't think I can do what I want with str_ireplace.

I think I will probably need to use something like preg_replace with some regex that also allows partial matches (ie: Don't limit to match a word boundary)- but I don't know how to set that up in my code example.

If it is true that I need to use preg_replace instead of str_ireplace, I could still use some help.

How can you do a case-insensitive search of the get_the_title() and get_the_excerpt() separately with the search term used - using preg_replace?

CodePudding user response：

Try this

$string = 'Test test REmotE emPloYee engAgeMent end string ';
$keys = array('remote Employee ENGAGE');

$patterns = array();

foreach($keys as $key) {    
$patterns[] = '/\b('.$key.'([^ ]*))\b/i';
echo preg_replace($patterns, '<span class="search-instance">$0</span>', $string);
}

What was the problem with your code, you were looking for a phrase and making a substitution. In this situation, we need to find a pattern in the string and if something matches this pattern then wrap that match with tags.

CodePudding user response：

I did find a way to do what I wanted. I found the solution from this page: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-highlight-the-search-terms-in-results-in-wordpress/

Here is the new code I changed:

<?php $title = get_the_title(); $keys= explode(" ",$s); $title = preg_replace('/('.implode('|', $keys) .')/iu', '<span class="search-instance">\0</span>', $title); ?>
<?php $excerpt = get_the_excerpt(); $keys= explode(" ",$s); $excerpt = preg_replace('/('.implode('|', $keys) .')/iu', '<span class="search-instance">\0</span>', $excerpt); ?>