Creating Tag Links from a Comma Delimited String

In this code snippet you will learn how to create tag links in PHP. Many websites or let’s say Web 2.0 sites use a lot of so called “tags” to create a relevant search based on keywords. I find the most efficient way to do this is to store the tags as a simple comma delimited string in a Varchar field of a database table per record / row. In this example I assume you already know how to query a database to return a simple result set. This example simply provides the string manipulation in PHP…

< ?php
$my_str = 'linux, apache, mysql, php';
$tags_arr = explode(',', $my_str);
$new_arr = array();
 
foreach ($tags_arr as  $tag)
{
    $clean_tag = trim($tag);
    $new_arr[] = '<a href="/index.php?tag='.$clean_tag.'">'.ucword($clean_tag).'';
}
 
$tags_str = implode(', ', $new_arr);
echo $tags_str;
?>

The above should output your comma delimited string into clickable tag links. If you want to get more creative, you can create a styled out tag cloud that alters the font size based on keyword density. Hopefully I can find some extra time to create a tutorial extending this one.

Enjoy!