preg_replace links from /index.php?section=xxx to section.html

I am writing a SEF mod for standard PHP websites, and have all the htaccess stuff done which takes links like domain.com/dynamic-page.html and reads it as domain.com/index.php?section=dynamic-page

But the problem is on page links which are either hardcoded or dynamically generated, either way there would be thousands of links to change from index.php?section=xxx to the SEF URL.

I have got as far as converting the links to <a href="dynamic-page">.... but can get the .html on the end.

Here's my code:

ob_start();

.....

$buffer = ob_get_contents(); 
ob_end_clean(); 

$pattern = '/index\.php\?section=/';
$replacement = '';
$buffer = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $buffer);

echo $buffer; 

PHP:

How do I trap that final bit of the link and stick a .html on the end?

 

Do you really have to process the whole page at once? I mean instead of generating a whole page with index..php?section=xxx, then change link to dynamic-page.html, why don't you generate dynamic-page.html at the beginning?

I'm not sure how do make index.php?section=xxxx on php page, but if you make it by echo, it would be much easy to change it to xxxx.html at this point (echo $xxx.html instead).

However, if you insist changing link to dynamic.html after the page has been generated, you can try my function (but this approach will be much slower than what I suggest above).

Assuming you have <a> tag exactly like this format <a href="index.php?section=abc">

function relink($buffer) {
	$store= $buffer;
	while (strpos($buffer, 'index.php?section=') !== false) {
		$ind= strpos($buffer, 'index.php?section=') +18;
		$buffer= substr($buffer, $ind);
		$lst= strpos($buffer, '"');
		$dynamic[]= substr($buffer, 0, $lst);
	}
	foreach ($dynamic as $lnk) {
		$store= str_replace("index.php?section=$lnk", "$lnk.html", $store);
	}
	return $store;
}

PHP:

 

Thank you very much Zandigo! Your solution has worked perfectly for me

I see now that the route I chose made it very difficult for myself. I knew I had to do find index.php?section= then get the wildcard between the = and the closing ".

The problem wasn't so much of the dynamically generated pages, it was the hard coded links in the many hundreds of pages.

Thanks again Zandigo

 

You are welcomed. I'm glad that i'm able to help you.