"like" search and highlighting in PHP

Question

I have list of brands and want to provide a search function with highlighting. For example, there are the following brands

• Apple
• Cewe Color
• L'Oréal
• Microsoft
• McDonald's
• Tom Tailor

The user then types lor in search form. I'm using the following snippet for searching

class search {
  private function simplify($str) {
    return str_replace(array('&',' ',',','.','?','|','\'','"'), '', iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $str));
  }
  public function do_search($search) {
    $search = self::simplify($search);
    $found = array();
    foreach (self::$_brands as $brand) {
      if (mb_strstr(self::simplify($brand['name']), $search) !== false) $found[]= $brand;
    }
    return $found;
  }
}

That gives me:

• Cewe Color
• L'Oréal
• Tom Tailor

How would be a highlighting possible? Like:

• Cewe Co<b>lor</b>
• L'<b>Oré</b>al
• Tom Tai<b>lor</b>

Btw: I know, that most things can be done with str_replace(), but that fit my needs not in all cases

Answer 1

self::$_brands contains result from database (containing columns name, name_lower, name_translit, name_simplified)

class search {
    private function translit($str) {
        return iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', str_replace(array('ä', 'ü', 'ö', 'ß'), array('a', 'u', 'o', 's'), mb_strtolower($str)));
    }

    private function simplify($str) {
        return preg_replace('/([^a-z0-9])/ui', '', self::translit($str));
    }

    public function do_search($simplified) {
        $found = array();
        foreach (self::$_brands as $brand) {
            if (mb_strstr($brand['name_simplified'], $simplified) !== false) $found[]= $brand;
        }
        return $found;
    }

    private function actionDefault() {
        $search = $_POST['search_fld'];
        $simplified = self::simplify($search);
        $result = self::do_search($simplified);
        $brands = array();
        foreach ($result as $brand) {
            $hl_start = mb_strpos($brand['name_simplified'], $simplified);
            $hl_len = mb_strlen($simplified);
            $brand_len = mb_strlen($brand['name']);
            $tmp = '';
            $cnt_extra = 0;
            $start_tag = false;
            $end_tag = false;
            for ($i = 0; $i < $brand_len; $i++) {
                if (($i - $cnt_extra) < mb_strlen($brand['name_simplified']) && mb_substr($brand['name_translit'], $i, 1) != mb_substr($brand['name_simplified'], $i - $cnt_extra, 1)) $cnt_extra++;
                if (($i - $cnt_extra) == $hl_start && !$start_tag) {
                    $tmp .= '<b>';
                    $start_tag = true;
                }
                $tmp .= mb_substr($brand['name'], $i, 1);
                if (($i - $cnt_extra + 1) == ($hl_start + $hl_len) && !$end_tag) {
                    $tmp .= '</b>';
                    $end_tag = true;
                }
            }
            if ($start_tag && !$end_tag) $tmp .= '</b>';
            $brands[] = "<a href=\"/brand/" . rawurlencode($brand['name']) . "\">" . $tmp . "</a>";
        }
        echo implode(' | ', $brands);
    }
}