Hello,

I am wanting to do some special formatting on the very first character of the very first paragraph on the Homepage of my site by including this within a <div>.

My issue is how to split this first character from the remaining characters from the $Content variable.

I have created a couple of functions and added these to my HomePage.php file:
function ContentFirstCharacter() {
return ($Content[0]);
}

function ContentLastCharacters() {
return (substr($Content,1));
}

It appears that the $Content variable is not available and these functions return blanks. I have tried to pass the variable as a parameter with no success either.

Can anyone give me a push in the right direction?

Many thanks,

Gary

To manipulate the content you need to use $this->Content; in the PHP, $Content is just for the templates.

Hi Pigoen,

Thanks for the reply. I did try this and I was receiving a '<' from ContentFirstCharacter. After a sleep, it seems obvious that this would be the first character of the HTML code included in the $Content variable (and referenced in PHP by $this->Content.

Can I strip the HTML from this variable and reference the text only in my PHP functions?

Kind regards,

Gary

Ah, of course it would return a '<'.

You want to do this:

$content = $this->dbObject('Content')->NoHTML();

That will give you the HTML stripped content.

Thanks Pigeon,

That cracked it. I had just tried the following with the same result:
$content = strip_tags($this->Content)

However, I have reverted to your code as this utilises the functions within SilverStripe.

Thanks for your help!

Cheers,

Gary