Turning freetext numbered lists into <ol> lists with PHP

I have a database with one text field that almost always has content in numbered steps, like as follows:

I am trying to write some PHP code that will turn that text into an HTML numbered list like as follows:

<ol>
<li>Do this first.</li>
<li>Then do something else.</li>
<li>And do something to finish.</li>
</ol>

Code (markup):

Can anyone help me with this? I'm sure it's not that hard but I suck at REGEXP.

 

You man be able to just use explode() if the items in the fields have any common separators.

you may find this function handy:

function multiexplode ($delimiters,$string) {
    $ary = explode($delimiters[0],$string);
    array_shift($delimiters);
    if($delimiters != NULL) {
        foreach($ary as $key => $val) {
             $ary[$key] = multiexplode($delimiters, $val);
        }
    }
    return  $ary;
}


// Example of use
$string = "1-2-3|4-5|6:7-8-9-0|1,2:3-4|5";
$delimiters = Array(",",":","|","-");

$res = multiexplode($delimiters,$string);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($res);
echo '</pre>';

Code (markup):

 

Personally I'd just perform a regular expression match to grab all of the list entries. This is untested, but I'm quite certain it should work (if not, a little tweaking and it should work):

// Perform regular expression match
preg_match_all( '/\d\.[\s]{0,1}(.+)[\\r\\n]{0,}/', $DbField, $Res );

// Append list HTML to variable
$Out = "<ol>\r\n";
foreach( $Res[1] as $Val ) {
	$Out .= "\t<li>" . $Val . "</li>\r\n";
}
$Out .= "</ol>";

PHP:

Where $DbField contains the plaintext list. Appends the HTML to variable $Out.

 

Works perfectly! Thanks .