Probably a simple problem here, but I cannot find it.
I am exploding a string that was input and stored from a textarea. I use nl2br() so that I can explode the string by the <br /> tag.
The string explodes properly, but when I try to get the first character of the string in a while loop, it only returns on the first line.
Note: The concept here is greentexting, so if you are familiar with that then you will see what I am trying to do. If you are not, I put a brief description below the code sample.
Code:
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($r, MYSQLI_ASSOC)) {
$comment = nl2br($row['comment']);
$sepcomment = explode("<br />", $comment);
$countcomment = count($sepcomment);
$i = 0;
//BEGIN GREENTEXT COLORING LOOP
while($i < $countcomment) {
$fb = $sepcomment[$i];
$z = $fb[0]; // Check to see if first character is >
if ($z == ">") {
$tcolor = "#789922";
}
else {
$tcolor = "#000000";
}
echo '<font color="' . $tcolor . '">' . $sepcomment[$i] . '</font><br>';
$i++;
}
//END GREENTEXT COLORING LOOP
}
Greentext: If the first character of the line is '>' then the color of that entire line becomes green. If not, then the color is black.
Picture: 
What I have tried:
- strip_tags() - Thinking that possibly the
tags were acting as the first characters. $fb = preg_replace("/(<br\s*\/?>\s*)+/", "", $sepcomment[$i]);- str_replace()
- echo $z //Shows the correct character on first line, blank on following lines.
- $z = substr($fb, 0, 1);
Here is a test I just did where I returned the first 5 characters of the string.
Any ideas for getting rid of those empty characters?